Democracy Now! - Harry Belafontehttp://www.democracynow.org/topics/harry_belafonte
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144144Democracy Now! - Harry Belafonteen-USDemocracy Now! - Harry Belafonte"Lift Every Voice": Potential Senate Hopeful Cory Booker Praises Harry Belafonte's Life of Activismhttp://www.democracynow.org/2013/2/18/lift_every_voice_potential_senate_hopeful
tag:democracynow.org,2013-02-18:en/story/6e62e0 AMY GOODMAN : As Black History Month continues, we spend the rest of the show with two prominent figures in the African-American community. On Friday night, the legendary musician, actor and activist Harry Belafonte received the NAACP&#8217;s Spingarn Medal, an annual award for the, quote, &quot;highest or noblest achievement by an African American during the preceding year or years.&quot; The award was presented to Belafonte by Newark Mayor Cory Booker, the man who could become New Jersey&#8217;s next senator. Booker introduced Belafonte just hours after New Jersey Senator Frank Lautenberg announced he will not seek re-election in 2014. While he hasn&#8217;t officially launched a campaign, Mayor Booker filed a statement of organization with the Federal Election Commission, a legal requirement to begin fundraising for the 2014 race. This is Mayor Cory Booker speaking Friday night at the NAACP awards ceremony.
MAYOR CORY BOOKER : You all sit down. I have this unfortunate experience. I feel it in my public life. I feel it with my dad. Any time I start thinking I&#8217;m somebody special, somebody comes on and reminds me. Now you had a Spingarn recipient named John Lewis, and Skip Gates calls me up and says, &quot;I want you to be in my show, Finding Your Roots .&quot; And I thought this was a wonderful thing. &quot;And I&#8217;m going to partner you with somebody else.&quot; I said, &quot;That&#8217;s a wonderful thing.&quot; And he said, &quot;I want to partner you with John Lewis.&quot; I said, &quot;What you talkin&#8217; about, Skip?&quot; Because this is how the show began. John Lewis stood on the front lines of the civil rights movement, on the Edmund Pettus Bridge, stared down Alabama state troopers for the cause of justice and righteousness. He bled that bridge red with his own blood, carried unconscious back to the church. He is a champion of the civil rights movement. And then it switched to my segment: Cory Booker at age seven fell off his tricycle and skinned his knee. Bleeding his sidewalk red, carried to his mama screaming like a little girl. I cannot escape the weight of history. And you all give me this privilege. I should be standing here letting you all know the depth of gratitude I cannot express. There would be no me without the NAACP .
And so, today you all take on the role of my mama and daddy, by giving me this honor of giving an award that was not earned simply by action. This man is a testimony to the ideals for which this award was conceived. But being that I have now had a friendship with the man who we shall discuss, I need to talk about him and tell the truth. I first knew of this man, who caused, in my household, in the God-given sanctity of marriage—he came in my house—I knew this man as a little boy because he was the one that caused divisiveness between my mother and my father, because my dad begrudgingly liked him, but my mama had a love for him like she should not have felt as a married woman. And so, when they talked about him, my mom might leave the room, and he would turn to me and say to me very simply, &quot;He&#8217;s a bad man, Cory. He&#8217;s a bad man. Harry Belafonte is a bad man.&quot; And so, my initial understanding was as one who&#8217;s a person that threatened to break up my household. I&#8217;ve never seen my mom move like she moved to your music. A young boy shouldn&#8217;t have to see his mother act like that. That voodoo that you do? I know it was criminal when you were growing up. So it took me a little while to come around to understanding that he was not a threat to me and my household, because you don&#8217;t mess with a boy&#8217;s mama.
But I&#8217;ll tell you this. My father used to say something to me. When I was a little boy, I was growing up, and I was a high schooler, you know, I thought I was something special. I would become the president of my class in high school. I was a high school All-American football player, honor roll. My father would look at me walking around and said, &quot;Boy, don&#8217;t you dare walk around here like you hit a triple. You were born on third base.&quot; And my father would look at me with his arms crossed and shake his head and said, &quot;Boy, boy, boy, you need to understand that you drink deeply from wells of freedom and liberty that you did not dig. You sit under the shade of trees that you did not plant or cultivate. You eat lavishly from banquet tables prepared for you by your ancestors. Now you have a choice. You can sit back and just consume and get fat, dumb and happy, or you can be one of those people that metabolizes your blessings and let them burn as fuel in the continued fight for equality, for justice.&quot;
And so, I stand here today with this deep sense of gratitude, because when my parents talked about drinking deeply from wells that were dug for me by others, this is a man who rolled up his sleeves when our people were parched and dug those wells. This was the man who, without even the understanding that there would be another generation that is me, was planting those trees, was preparing that table. You have to understand, I was not born until 1969. The battles and the challenges from the Freedom Rides, civil rights, all of this came before me. And when I came into the world, I didn&#8217;t have a road paved for me; I had the road paved. There were rest stops built. There were lights, guideposts, signs.
And so, I matured into understanding that Harry Belafonte was not just someone who was the music my parents played. He wasn&#8217;t just someone that my—they delighted to on the television, that God gave him those gifts, and he shared them abundantly, speaking a poetry and artistry that shook the very dust off of our souls, helped us to celebrate and rejoice in God, but that was not the totality of the man. The greatness of Harry Belafonte is that he never, ever mistook celebrity with significance. He never mistook popularity with purpose. He always understood that the gifts God give you are not yours alone, that the testimony of a man is how he shares those gifts with others not just when people are watching, not when it&#8217;s just comfortable and convenient, not to slip a little charity out of your pocket to an outstretched hand. True greatness comes when you take sacrifices and risks, when you are unpopular, when you are cast out, when you are castigated, when people throw bricks at you, but yet you do it anyway.
I stand here today proud and honored, humbled of heart, because what I have come to know, before I even met the man, was that this was the standard to which I must uphold if I was to prove worthy of the legacy I inherited. He never thought that leadership was about having everybody look at you and celebrate you and follow you, that true greatness is helping other people discover that they too are great. True leadership is helping other people understand that they have an obligation to lead.
But now let me get you to a point where my idol became my friend. I&#8217;ll never forget this. It was a dinner table around some mutual friends, and I had a chance to sit next to Harry Belafonte. And I found out that my dad&#8217;s suspicions were true. He is a very mischievous man. He has a playfulness of heart. He did not take himself too seriously. He was humble. You know, some folks, you feel like you have to go before them and genuflect and kiss the ring. He treated me like I was one of his. He treated me like my dad would treat me. And more than this, as I got to know his friendship, this elder statesman, I began to see that his testimony was: Don&#8217;t you dare put me out to pasture, because you have to understand, as long as there is breath in this body, as long as there are blood in these veins, as long as a god animates me with his spirit, I will be doing God&#8217;s work, and you better listen to me.
And let me tell you something, Harry Belafonte can talk. Thank God, he got something to say. And I have now heard stories that brought tears to my eyes. Tears to my eyes. As he talked to me about what it was to be on the front lines of the civil rights movement, to be around the table when you are faced with impossible decisions, to feel the pressure and the fear of death. I&#8217;ll never forget what he taught me that helped reaffirm in my heart the very definition of hope. As he told a story of Martin Luther King, himself despairing for a moment, catching himself in a moment of despair, worrying that we would achieve this integration, but what does it mean when you are integrating people into a house that is on fire with poverty and inequity? What does it mean? And he said King despaired about this American house at war in Vietnam with separations of wealth. And as he told me this story, I leaned forward, and then he said, &quot;King caught himself and said, &#39;Well, I guess if the house is on fire, we&#39;re just going to have to go out there and be the fire department, too.&#8217;&quot;
You see, this is the shift that made me fall in love with this man and make me have this want to be my great—one of my life&#8217;s great honors, to stand before you and present him with this historic medal. And I&#8217;ll tell you what it is. You see, Harry Belafonte has not stopped fighting to put out that fire. He is a—now, one who stands and calls to the conscience of this community that we have problems that are deep, we have challenges that are high. We have to understand that th urgency of our past is still here with us in the present. You see, my boys here from Newark, yet are not the—please. They&#8217;re still not the norm. We&#8217;re losing black boys at a rate that is alarming. How could we go from being a people in chains to now large percentages of our men are in shackles in prison in the land of the free? You have a state like New Jersey where 65 percent of our prison population is black, when only 13 percent of our state is black. There is a problem, and Harry Belafonte wants to talk about it.
How can we have a generation pass for—where Medgar, where Martin, where Malcolm died for us at gunfire, and now we live in communities where black-on-black crime is at rates we have never seen before, challenging the sanctity, the strength and the endurance of our communities? I&#8217;ve heard Harry Belafonte talk about this. How can we have a nation that for years now has been growing in wealth, but real wages have declined, so the few are getting wealthier and wealthier, and the many are getting poorer and poorer and poorer? Harry Belafonte is talking about this.
And so, I get delighted that he is my friend, because he is relentless in his joy of God&#8217;s given life that we have. It&#8217;s a celebration. But it is also an obligation to do as he does, to speak truth to power. It&#8217;s an obligation, the day we are weary, we cannot rest. It&#8217;s an obligation to wake up the echoes of our past and let them illuminate our presence. And this is what his life is a testimony to. It is a calling of our national anthem in the Negro community. This is what I hear Harry Belafonte say: &quot;Lift every voice,&quot; because, as King said, change will not roll in on the wheels of inevitability; it must be carried in on the backs of people willing to struggle and sacrifice. This is what Harry Belafonte is saying: &quot;Lift every voice,&quot; because, as Frederick Douglass says, in life, you don&#8217;t get everything you pay for, but you must pay for everything you get. &quot;Lift every voice,&quot; he&#8217;s saying to us, because, as a great artist and poet Langston Hughes says, there is still a dream in this land with its back against the wall, to save the dream for one, we must save the dream for all.
And so, I know we are giving this award in recognition of a lifetime of service, of sacrifice, of significance. But I tell you what charges me up is that this man is relentless in the present and purposeful in his future, because as long as he walks this earth, he will be calling on us to lift every voice and sing, with his beauty, with his eloquence, with his gifts, to sing as he sung to wake up a globe, to sing as he sung until the entire world resonates with the justice that he has been calling for since he was a young boy breaking up families like mine. Ladies and gentleman, I bring you my friend, my hero, I bring you the great Harry Belafonte.
AMY GOODMAN : Newark Mayor Cory Booker speaking Friday night at an NAACP event honoring Harry Belafonte. Booker spoke just hours after New Jersey Senator Frank Lautenberg announced he would not seek re-election, paving the way for a likely run by Mayor Booker, who has already set up an exploratory committee. When we come back, we go to the man of the hour, Harry Belafonte. Stay with us. AMYGOODMAN: As Black History Month continues, we spend the rest of the show with two prominent figures in the African-American community. On Friday night, the legendary musician, actor and activist Harry Belafonte received the NAACP’s Spingarn Medal, an annual award for the, quote, "highest or noblest achievement by an African American during the preceding year or years." The award was presented to Belafonte by Newark Mayor Cory Booker, the man who could become New Jersey’s next senator. Booker introduced Belafonte just hours after New Jersey Senator Frank Lautenberg announced he will not seek re-election in 2014. While he hasn’t officially launched a campaign, Mayor Booker filed a statement of organization with the Federal Election Commission, a legal requirement to begin fundraising for the 2014 race. This is Mayor Cory Booker speaking Friday night at the NAACP awards ceremony.

MAYORCORYBOOKER: You all sit down. I have this unfortunate experience. I feel it in my public life. I feel it with my dad. Any time I start thinking I’m somebody special, somebody comes on and reminds me. Now you had a Spingarn recipient named John Lewis, and Skip Gates calls me up and says, "I want you to be in my show, Finding Your Roots." And I thought this was a wonderful thing. "And I’m going to partner you with somebody else." I said, "That’s a wonderful thing." And he said, "I want to partner you with John Lewis." I said, "What you talkin’ about, Skip?" Because this is how the show began. John Lewis stood on the front lines of the civil rights movement, on the Edmund Pettus Bridge, stared down Alabama state troopers for the cause of justice and righteousness. He bled that bridge red with his own blood, carried unconscious back to the church. He is a champion of the civil rights movement. And then it switched to my segment: Cory Booker at age seven fell off his tricycle and skinned his knee. Bleeding his sidewalk red, carried to his mama screaming like a little girl. I cannot escape the weight of history. And you all give me this privilege. I should be standing here letting you all know the depth of gratitude I cannot express. There would be no me without the NAACP.

And so, today you all take on the role of my mama and daddy, by giving me this honor of giving an award that was not earned simply by action. This man is a testimony to the ideals for which this award was conceived. But being that I have now had a friendship with the man who we shall discuss, I need to talk about him and tell the truth. I first knew of this man, who caused, in my household, in the God-given sanctity of marriage—he came in my house—I knew this man as a little boy because he was the one that caused divisiveness between my mother and my father, because my dad begrudgingly liked him, but my mama had a love for him like she should not have felt as a married woman. And so, when they talked about him, my mom might leave the room, and he would turn to me and say to me very simply, "He’s a bad man, Cory. He’s a bad man. Harry Belafonte is a bad man." And so, my initial understanding was as one who’s a person that threatened to break up my household. I’ve never seen my mom move like she moved to your music. A young boy shouldn’t have to see his mother act like that. That voodoo that you do? I know it was criminal when you were growing up. So it took me a little while to come around to understanding that he was not a threat to me and my household, because you don’t mess with a boy’s mama.

But I’ll tell you this. My father used to say something to me. When I was a little boy, I was growing up, and I was a high schooler, you know, I thought I was something special. I would become the president of my class in high school. I was a high school All-American football player, honor roll. My father would look at me walking around and said, "Boy, don’t you dare walk around here like you hit a triple. You were born on third base." And my father would look at me with his arms crossed and shake his head and said, "Boy, boy, boy, you need to understand that you drink deeply from wells of freedom and liberty that you did not dig. You sit under the shade of trees that you did not plant or cultivate. You eat lavishly from banquet tables prepared for you by your ancestors. Now you have a choice. You can sit back and just consume and get fat, dumb and happy, or you can be one of those people that metabolizes your blessings and let them burn as fuel in the continued fight for equality, for justice."

And so, I stand here today with this deep sense of gratitude, because when my parents talked about drinking deeply from wells that were dug for me by others, this is a man who rolled up his sleeves when our people were parched and dug those wells. This was the man who, without even the understanding that there would be another generation that is me, was planting those trees, was preparing that table. You have to understand, I was not born until 1969. The battles and the challenges from the Freedom Rides, civil rights, all of this came before me. And when I came into the world, I didn’t have a road paved for me; I had the road paved. There were rest stops built. There were lights, guideposts, signs.

And so, I matured into understanding that Harry Belafonte was not just someone who was the music my parents played. He wasn’t just someone that my—they delighted to on the television, that God gave him those gifts, and he shared them abundantly, speaking a poetry and artistry that shook the very dust off of our souls, helped us to celebrate and rejoice in God, but that was not the totality of the man. The greatness of Harry Belafonte is that he never, ever mistook celebrity with significance. He never mistook popularity with purpose. He always understood that the gifts God give you are not yours alone, that the testimony of a man is how he shares those gifts with others not just when people are watching, not when it’s just comfortable and convenient, not to slip a little charity out of your pocket to an outstretched hand. True greatness comes when you take sacrifices and risks, when you are unpopular, when you are cast out, when you are castigated, when people throw bricks at you, but yet you do it anyway.

I stand here today proud and honored, humbled of heart, because what I have come to know, before I even met the man, was that this was the standard to which I must uphold if I was to prove worthy of the legacy I inherited. He never thought that leadership was about having everybody look at you and celebrate you and follow you, that true greatness is helping other people discover that they too are great. True leadership is helping other people understand that they have an obligation to lead.

But now let me get you to a point where my idol became my friend. I’ll never forget this. It was a dinner table around some mutual friends, and I had a chance to sit next to Harry Belafonte. And I found out that my dad’s suspicions were true. He is a very mischievous man. He has a playfulness of heart. He did not take himself too seriously. He was humble. You know, some folks, you feel like you have to go before them and genuflect and kiss the ring. He treated me like I was one of his. He treated me like my dad would treat me. And more than this, as I got to know his friendship, this elder statesman, I began to see that his testimony was: Don’t you dare put me out to pasture, because you have to understand, as long as there is breath in this body, as long as there are blood in these veins, as long as a god animates me with his spirit, I will be doing God’s work, and you better listen to me.

And let me tell you something, Harry Belafonte can talk. Thank God, he got something to say. And I have now heard stories that brought tears to my eyes. Tears to my eyes. As he talked to me about what it was to be on the front lines of the civil rights movement, to be around the table when you are faced with impossible decisions, to feel the pressure and the fear of death. I’ll never forget what he taught me that helped reaffirm in my heart the very definition of hope. As he told a story of Martin Luther King, himself despairing for a moment, catching himself in a moment of despair, worrying that we would achieve this integration, but what does it mean when you are integrating people into a house that is on fire with poverty and inequity? What does it mean? And he said King despaired about this American house at war in Vietnam with separations of wealth. And as he told me this story, I leaned forward, and then he said, "King caught himself and said, 'Well, I guess if the house is on fire, we're just going to have to go out there and be the fire department, too.’"

You see, this is the shift that made me fall in love with this man and make me have this want to be my great—one of my life’s great honors, to stand before you and present him with this historic medal. And I’ll tell you what it is. You see, Harry Belafonte has not stopped fighting to put out that fire. He is a—now, one who stands and calls to the conscience of this community that we have problems that are deep, we have challenges that are high. We have to understand that th urgency of our past is still here with us in the present. You see, my boys here from Newark, yet are not the—please. They’re still not the norm. We’re losing black boys at a rate that is alarming. How could we go from being a people in chains to now large percentages of our men are in shackles in prison in the land of the free? You have a state like New Jersey where 65 percent of our prison population is black, when only 13 percent of our state is black. There is a problem, and Harry Belafonte wants to talk about it.

How can we have a generation pass for—where Medgar, where Martin, where Malcolm died for us at gunfire, and now we live in communities where black-on-black crime is at rates we have never seen before, challenging the sanctity, the strength and the endurance of our communities? I’ve heard Harry Belafonte talk about this. How can we have a nation that for years now has been growing in wealth, but real wages have declined, so the few are getting wealthier and wealthier, and the many are getting poorer and poorer and poorer? Harry Belafonte is talking about this.

And so, I get delighted that he is my friend, because he is relentless in his joy of God’s given life that we have. It’s a celebration. But it is also an obligation to do as he does, to speak truth to power. It’s an obligation, the day we are weary, we cannot rest. It’s an obligation to wake up the echoes of our past and let them illuminate our presence. And this is what his life is a testimony to. It is a calling of our national anthem in the Negro community. This is what I hear Harry Belafonte say: "Lift every voice," because, as King said, change will not roll in on the wheels of inevitability; it must be carried in on the backs of people willing to struggle and sacrifice. This is what Harry Belafonte is saying: "Lift every voice," because, as Frederick Douglass says, in life, you don’t get everything you pay for, but you must pay for everything you get. "Lift every voice," he’s saying to us, because, as a great artist and poet Langston Hughes says, there is still a dream in this land with its back against the wall, to save the dream for one, we must save the dream for all.

And so, I know we are giving this award in recognition of a lifetime of service, of sacrifice, of significance. But I tell you what charges me up is that this man is relentless in the present and purposeful in his future, because as long as he walks this earth, he will be calling on us to lift every voice and sing, with his beauty, with his eloquence, with his gifts, to sing as he sung to wake up a globe, to sing as he sung until the entire world resonates with the justice that he has been calling for since he was a young boy breaking up families like mine. Ladies and gentleman, I bring you my friend, my hero, I bring you the great Harry Belafonte.

AMYGOODMAN: Newark Mayor Cory Booker speaking Friday night at an NAACP event honoring Harry Belafonte. Booker spoke just hours after New Jersey Senator Frank Lautenberg announced he would not seek re-election, paving the way for a likely run by Mayor Booker, who has already set up an exploratory committee. When we come back, we go to the man of the hour, Harry Belafonte. Stay with us.

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Mon, 18 Feb 2013 00:00:00 -0500"We Must Unleash Radical Thought": Harry Belafonte's Stirring Speech Accepting NAACP Spingarn Medalhttp://www.democracynow.org/2013/2/18/we_must_unleash_radical_thought_harry
tag:democracynow.org,2013-02-18:en/story/15d5d2 AMY GOODMAN : &quot;Harlem Nocturne&quot; by Earle Hagen and Dick Rogers, performed by the Newark Boys Chorus, singing Friday night at the NAACP event honoring the legendary musician Harry Belafonte. This is Democracy Now! , democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report . I&#8217;m Amy Goodman.
The son of Caribbean immigrants, Harry Belafonte grew up on the streets of Harlem and Jamaica. In the &#39;50s, he spearheaded the calypso craze, became the first artist in recording history with a million-selling album. He was also the first African-American musician to win an Emmy. Along with his rise to worldwide stardom, Belafonte became deeply involved in the civil rights movement. One of Dr. King&#39;s closest confidants, he helped organize the March on Washington in 1963.
Well, on Friday night, the NAACP honored him with their highest honor, the Spingarn Medal. He began his speech referring to Newark Mayor Cory Booker&#8217;s introduction.
HARRY BELAFONTE : Mayor Booker, that was heavy. I—I don&#8217;t know that I&#8217;ve ever been introduced quite like that before. And as you called out the moments that represent the crossroads of the paths in my life, I&#8217;m reminded that no matter how I am anointed for what it is that I do and try to do, it was never without the knowledge and the joy that what I said and what I still say was really rooted in the courage and the strength of so many remarkable people who befriended me and who counseled me and who became an intricate part of my journey. And to sit here and to watch you do the work that you do in the city of Newark, which is not a garden, not a paradise, but a place of remarkable struggle, you are to be anointed for how well you&#8217;re doing the job in Newark. But your mother didn&#8217;t tell you everything. But your daddy was my best friend.
What I&#8217;m about to say, I had occasion to say a couple of weeks ago. I was in California celebrating the NAACP Image Awards. And what made that event, which I have attended quite often, and I&#8217;ve been anointed with the awards in different intervals in my journey, but what made this one particularly significant was that it was the first time that in the history of the NAACP awards that the Spingarn Medal honoree was being platformed. So the country got an opportunity to not only look at the young men and women who have achieved so much in the arts, but to also take a moment and a pause to look at our social concerns as well as our social journey. The speech I&#8217;m about to give is one that I gave the night on television. Some of you may have heard it. And for those of you who haven&#8217;t, I will give you the opportunity to hear it now. For those who are hearing it for the second time, I hope the redundancy doesn&#8217;t drive you from the room. But it won&#8217;t be long. But it says there&#8217;s a preciseness to the thought, when I put those thoughts on paper, that it was about America as I see it today and where we stand.
The group that is most devastated by America&#8217;s obsession with the gun is African Americans. Although making comparisons can be dangerous, there are times when they must be noted. America has the largest prison population in the world, and the over two million men, women and children who make up the incarcerated, the overwhelming majority of them is black. African Americans are the most unemployed, the most caught in the unjust systems of justice. And in the gun game, they are the most hunted. The rivers of blood that wash the streets of our nation flow mostly from the bodies of our black children. Yet, as the great debate emerges on the question of the gun, white America discusses the constitutional issues of ownership, while no one speaks to the consequences of our racial carnage. Where is the outraged voice of black America? Where? And why are we mute? Where are our leaders? Where are our legislators? Where is the church?
Not all, but many who have been the recipients of this distinguished award, were men and women who spoke up to remedy the ills of the nation. They were all committed to radical thought. They were my mentors, my inspiration, my moral compass. Through them, I understood America&#8217;s greatness. I understood America&#8217;s potential. Dr. W.E.B. Du Bois, Martin Luther King Jr., Eleanor Roosevelt, and others like Fannie Lou Hamer and Ella Baker, Bobby Kennedy and Miss Constance Rice, and perhaps, for me, most of all, Paul Robeson.
For me, Mr. Robeson was the sparrow. He was an artist who made those of us in the arts understand the depth of that calling, when he said, &quot;Artists are the gatekeepers of truth. We are civilization&#8217;s radical voice.&quot; Never in the history of black America has there been such a harvest of truly gifted and powerfully celebrated artists. Yet, our nation hungers for their radical song. In the field of sports, our presence dominates. In the landscape of corporate power, we have more African-American presence as captains and leaders of industry than we&#8217;ve ever known. Yet we suffer still from abject poverty and moral malnutrition.
Our only hope lies in the recall of a moment which has been to referred to earlier here, and was my last meeting with Dr. King. It was just before he left to go off to Memphis to join the strike with sanitation workers. We held a strategy meeting, and Dr. King—the meeting was in my home, and Dr. King, during that meeting, appeared to be distracted and in a dark mood. When we asked him what was the matter, he said, &quot;We have come far in the struggle for integration, and although we may be winning some battles, we have not won the war. And I have come to the conclusion that in our struggle to integrate, we may be integrating into a burning house.&quot; That thought, we found deeply disturbing. And when we asked him if such was his belief, what would he have us do? And his reply was, &quot;We will have to become firemen.&quot;
Numerous strategies in the quest of our freedom has been played out at all levels of the social spectrum—youth groups, women&#8217;s groups, labor groups, religious groups. The list goes on and on. And yet, the opposition persists in its resistance to our quest. What is missing, I think, from the equation in our struggle today is that we must unleash radical thought. America keeps that part of the discourse mute. I would make an appeal for the NAACP , as the oldest institution in our quest for human dignity and human rights, that we stimulate more fully the concept and the need for radical thinking. America has never been moved to perfect our desire for greater democracy without radical thinking and radical voices being at the helm of any such quest.
The pursuit of justice is all I have ever known. And I have often said that what defines a true patriot—and in reading a book, The Life of Theodore Roosevelt , I came upon a quote, where he said that when the state finds itself moving away from its commitment to the rights of the citizen, when those rights are being trampled and misguided, when there are those who would wrest from the Constitution the equality that it attempted to give all of us, then the citizens of the nation have not only the obligation, but the right, to challenge the state and those who run it. And he said, if we fail to do that, if we fail to meet that moral criteria, then we, the citizens, should be charged with patriotic treason.
And that struck me because what we are really on is a journey to end the treasonous behavior of the contemporary political scene and what it is trying to do to steal our votes—to steal our votes, to what it&#8217;s doing to our women, to what it&#8217;s doing to our children, to what it&#8217;s doing to wherever black people have moments of need and want. I would ask that unless black America—or I would say that unless black America raises its voice loud and clear, America—and it is specifically our responsibility—of all the cultural diversity that makes up this nation and its promise to be great, the most powerful force is the voice of African Americans, and America will never become whole, and America will never become what it dreams to be, until we are truly free and truly a bigger part of this.
AMY GOODMAN : The legendary actor, musician, activist Harry Belafonte, speaking on Friday night, awarded the NAACP&#8217;s Spingarn Medal. He turns 86 years old on March 1st. You can go to our website for our full interview with Harry Belafonte , our archive of interviews. AMYGOODMAN: "Harlem Nocturne" by Earle Hagen and Dick Rogers, performed by the Newark Boys Chorus, singing Friday night at the NAACP event honoring the legendary musician Harry Belafonte. This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. I’m Amy Goodman.

The son of Caribbean immigrants, Harry Belafonte grew up on the streets of Harlem and Jamaica. In the '50s, he spearheaded the calypso craze, became the first artist in recording history with a million-selling album. He was also the first African-American musician to win an Emmy. Along with his rise to worldwide stardom, Belafonte became deeply involved in the civil rights movement. One of Dr. King's closest confidants, he helped organize the March on Washington in 1963.

Well, on Friday night, the NAACP honored him with their highest honor, the Spingarn Medal. He began his speech referring to Newark Mayor Cory Booker’s introduction.

HARRYBELAFONTE: Mayor Booker, that was heavy. I—I don’t know that I’ve ever been introduced quite like that before. And as you called out the moments that represent the crossroads of the paths in my life, I’m reminded that no matter how I am anointed for what it is that I do and try to do, it was never without the knowledge and the joy that what I said and what I still say was really rooted in the courage and the strength of so many remarkable people who befriended me and who counseled me and who became an intricate part of my journey. And to sit here and to watch you do the work that you do in the city of Newark, which is not a garden, not a paradise, but a place of remarkable struggle, you are to be anointed for how well you’re doing the job in Newark. But your mother didn’t tell you everything. But your daddy was my best friend.

What I’m about to say, I had occasion to say a couple of weeks ago. I was in California celebrating the NAACP Image Awards. And what made that event, which I have attended quite often, and I’ve been anointed with the awards in different intervals in my journey, but what made this one particularly significant was that it was the first time that in the history of the NAACP awards that the Spingarn Medal honoree was being platformed. So the country got an opportunity to not only look at the young men and women who have achieved so much in the arts, but to also take a moment and a pause to look at our social concerns as well as our social journey. The speech I’m about to give is one that I gave the night on television. Some of you may have heard it. And for those of you who haven’t, I will give you the opportunity to hear it now. For those who are hearing it for the second time, I hope the redundancy doesn’t drive you from the room. But it won’t be long. But it says there’s a preciseness to the thought, when I put those thoughts on paper, that it was about America as I see it today and where we stand.

The group that is most devastated by America’s obsession with the gun is African Americans. Although making comparisons can be dangerous, there are times when they must be noted. America has the largest prison population in the world, and the over two million men, women and children who make up the incarcerated, the overwhelming majority of them is black. African Americans are the most unemployed, the most caught in the unjust systems of justice. And in the gun game, they are the most hunted. The rivers of blood that wash the streets of our nation flow mostly from the bodies of our black children. Yet, as the great debate emerges on the question of the gun, white America discusses the constitutional issues of ownership, while no one speaks to the consequences of our racial carnage. Where is the outraged voice of black America? Where? And why are we mute? Where are our leaders? Where are our legislators? Where is the church?

Not all, but many who have been the recipients of this distinguished award, were men and women who spoke up to remedy the ills of the nation. They were all committed to radical thought. They were my mentors, my inspiration, my moral compass. Through them, I understood America’s greatness. I understood America’s potential. Dr. W.E.B. Du Bois, Martin Luther King Jr., Eleanor Roosevelt, and others like Fannie Lou Hamer and Ella Baker, Bobby Kennedy and Miss Constance Rice, and perhaps, for me, most of all, Paul Robeson.

For me, Mr. Robeson was the sparrow. He was an artist who made those of us in the arts understand the depth of that calling, when he said, "Artists are the gatekeepers of truth. We are civilization’s radical voice." Never in the history of black America has there been such a harvest of truly gifted and powerfully celebrated artists. Yet, our nation hungers for their radical song. In the field of sports, our presence dominates. In the landscape of corporate power, we have more African-American presence as captains and leaders of industry than we’ve ever known. Yet we suffer still from abject poverty and moral malnutrition.

Our only hope lies in the recall of a moment which has been to referred to earlier here, and was my last meeting with Dr. King. It was just before he left to go off to Memphis to join the strike with sanitation workers. We held a strategy meeting, and Dr. King—the meeting was in my home, and Dr. King, during that meeting, appeared to be distracted and in a dark mood. When we asked him what was the matter, he said, "We have come far in the struggle for integration, and although we may be winning some battles, we have not won the war. And I have come to the conclusion that in our struggle to integrate, we may be integrating into a burning house." That thought, we found deeply disturbing. And when we asked him if such was his belief, what would he have us do? And his reply was, "We will have to become firemen."

Numerous strategies in the quest of our freedom has been played out at all levels of the social spectrum—youth groups, women’s groups, labor groups, religious groups. The list goes on and on. And yet, the opposition persists in its resistance to our quest. What is missing, I think, from the equation in our struggle today is that we must unleash radical thought. America keeps that part of the discourse mute. I would make an appeal for the NAACP, as the oldest institution in our quest for human dignity and human rights, that we stimulate more fully the concept and the need for radical thinking. America has never been moved to perfect our desire for greater democracy without radical thinking and radical voices being at the helm of any such quest.

The pursuit of justice is all I have ever known. And I have often said that what defines a true patriot—and in reading a book, The Life of Theodore Roosevelt, I came upon a quote, where he said that when the state finds itself moving away from its commitment to the rights of the citizen, when those rights are being trampled and misguided, when there are those who would wrest from the Constitution the equality that it attempted to give all of us, then the citizens of the nation have not only the obligation, but the right, to challenge the state and those who run it. And he said, if we fail to do that, if we fail to meet that moral criteria, then we, the citizens, should be charged with patriotic treason.

And that struck me because what we are really on is a journey to end the treasonous behavior of the contemporary political scene and what it is trying to do to steal our votes—to steal our votes, to what it’s doing to our women, to what it’s doing to our children, to what it’s doing to wherever black people have moments of need and want. I would ask that unless black America—or I would say that unless black America raises its voice loud and clear, America—and it is specifically our responsibility—of all the cultural diversity that makes up this nation and its promise to be great, the most powerful force is the voice of African Americans, and America will never become whole, and America will never become what it dreams to be, until we are truly free and truly a bigger part of this.

AMYGOODMAN: The legendary actor, musician, activist Harry Belafonte, speaking on Friday night, awarded the NAACP’s Spingarn Medal. He turns 86 years old on March 1st. You can go to our website for our full interview with Harry Belafonte, our archive of interviews.

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Mon, 18 Feb 2013 00:00:00 -0500“Sing Your Song”: Harry Belafonte on Art & Politics, Civil Rights & His Critique of President Obamahttp://www.democracynow.org/2011/5/16/sing_your_song_harry_belafonte_on
tag:democracynow.org,2011-05-16:en/story/25ef72 AMY GOODMAN : Fifty years ago, a mixed group of black and white students calling themselves the Freedom Riders risked their lives by riding buses into the South to challenge segregation. On May 16, 1961, their bus was attacked by a mob when it stopped in Birmingham, Alabama. A new documentary that traces the Freedom Ride movement premiers tonight on PBS American Experience .
Well, today we spend the hour with one of those who supported the Freedom Rides and played a key role in the civil rights movement: the legendary musician, actor and humanitarian, Harry Belafonte. The son of Jamaican immigrants, Harry Belafonte grew up in the streets of Harlem and Jamaica. In the &#39;50s, he spearheaded the calypso craze, was the first person in history to sell over a million albums. He was also the first African American to win an Emmy. Along with his rise to worldwide stardom, Harry Belafonte became deeply involved in the civil rights movement. He was one of Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King&#39;s closest confidants and helped to organize the March on Washington in 1963.
Now a new documentary chronicles his life. It&#8217;s called Sing Your Song . It&#8217;s co-produced by Harry Belafonte&#8217;s daughter Gina. [It will air on HBO this fall.] I sat down with Harry Belafonte in Park City, Utah, after his film premiered at the Sundance Film Festival and began by asking him why he made Sing Your Song .
HARRY BELAFONTE : It came into being from so many different perspectives. So many coincidences collided, and all of a sudden one day I woke up, and there I was with cameras rolling everywhere. A lot of people have often talked to me about leaving some memoir behind on my journey, and especially my daughter Gina, who is just always prodding me to &mdash; &quot;You&#8217;ve got to do it. You&#8217;ve got to do it. You&#8217;ve got to do it.&quot; And although I kind of understood the spirit of the challenge, I was deeply concerned about how you would take 80 years of history and all the things that I thought were important to my journey and put that into the technology and into the demands of pop culture and getting the word out.
What tilted my commitment to this was the death of a friend. Marlon Brando was my schoolmate. We met each other before our platforms had given us the access that we have had. And when he passed away, beyond having lost a close friend, what bothered me was that what he was about and how he used his power and his platform, his art and his own history, in a commitment to the disenfranchised, for the wretched of the earth, for people who had no one articulating as fully as they should for the interests of those who have been abused and oppressed, and the way he stepped into it, sometimes quietly &mdash; most of the time quietly &mdash; and did what he did with it &mdash; the indigenous people, Native Americans, Latinos &mdash; the way he stepped into the black community, the way in which he used himself, you know, a tremendous force, to move the agenda, without any exploitation of &quot;Look at me, and here&#8217;s what I&#8217;m doing.&quot; With his passing away, he took that legacy with him, and I wasn&#8217;t sure who would be around to retrieve it.
And then I began to look at a number of people like him who had passed away and we never sang their song. And they always sang ours. And that became the kind of a titillating concept that let me think that maybe we could do this. My great fear was about a lot of self-anointing. We are, at worst or at best, very narcissistic in our profession. It&#8217;s always about &quot;Look at me! Look at me! Look at me!&quot; And although some of that is unavoidable, I was concerned that my journey would carry too much of that self-serving. Yet, from a cinema point of view, I was the only force that could take the audience through the narrative. I was the only one that I had at my disposal that could personalize the information.
AMY GOODMAN : Talk about your first memories of being politically active, your consciousness of who you were in this country, in the United States of America.
HARRY BELAFONTE : I&#8217;m not quite sure precisely when social and political activism became a visible brand of my DNA , but it seems to me that I was born into it. It is hard to be born into the experience in the world of poverty and not develop some instinct for survival and resistance to those things that oppress you. My mother was a feisty lady. Although she had never gotten into a place of formal education, she came here and had to learn skills, became a seamstress. She became an expert cook. She worked at odds and ends in jobs. She never resisted the opportunity to fight oppression, especially segregation and all the things that plagued people who were immigrants. In her resistance, she counseled us constantly.
AMY GOODMAN : Now, professionally, you started more acting before you really professionally singing, is that right?
HARRY BELAFONTE : Well, acting was the complete key, was the main key to my getting involved. In this play that we did of Steinbeck&#8217;s Of Mice and Men , the director had created a character in the play who would become the balladeer. He would be a force. The director moved throughout the play to &mdash; in the changing of sets, changing of cues, lighting cues, changing of mood. And this character would emerge from the darkness of the corners of the stage and sing the songs of the day, for those migrant workers coming from Southwest America. And most of the songs that I had to sing were the songs that had been written by Huddie Ledbetter and by Woody Guthrie. As a matter of fact, I opened the play with a Woody Guthrie song.
Anyway, let me jump to the quick of this. It was approaching the material as an actor, because the director spent a lot of time on what the balladeer would do, how he would positioned and &mdash; how he would be positioned, what the intensity of the moment of singing the song would mean to the development of the play or the scene. And in that context, I approached music as a tool that was really about social information. It wasn&#8217;t just harmony and chords and notes and melody, all that was obvious. But it was the content and the power of song. And having been heard in that play in that context, I was offered a job to become a singer. And since I couldn&#8217;t find other work, being a singer was a good challenge. So I put a repertoire together, walked into a night club called the Royal Roost, met guys like Charlie Parker and Miles Davis and Max Roach.
AMY GOODMAN : They were your backup band?
HARRY BELAFONTE : My first backup band were those guys. And they just launched me into a world from which I have never looked back.
AMY GOODMAN : Harry Belafonte, the legendary music, actor and humanitarian. A new film is out on his life. It&#8217;s called Sing Your Song . We&#8217;re back with Harry in a minute.
[break]
AMY GOODMAN : &quot;Jamaica Farewell&quot; by Harry Belafonte, the son of Jamaican immigrants. This is Democracy Now! , democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. I&#8217;m Amy Goodman, as we continue with the legendary musician, actor and humanitarian. He&#8217;s the subject of a new documentary about his life called Sing Your Song .
AMY GOODMAN : Well, one of the incredible stories told in Sing Your Song is your traveling through the South and trying to sing your song. Talk about that experience.
HARRY BELAFONTE : Paul Robeson, who was a mentor and a man for whom I had enormous love and admiration, was the supreme example for me of how to use your life with dignity and with courage &mdash; not bravado, but genuine social courage, to put all that&#8217;s on the line to come up against the forces of oppression, who controlled so much of what you could or could not do as an artist. And to defy that fact and go after the larger goal of changing the faces of oppression inspired me. And he went everywhere there was the opportunity to be heard, whether it was going into Spain to sing during the great Spanish revolutionary war in &#8217;30s, whether it was going to England. He went and he worked with the Welsh miners. As a matter of fact, his whole engagement, politically, had been stimulated by what happened when he met the Welsh miners. And he sang with them, and he went into their world.
Well, when I watched what he did and how many places he went for inspiration, and mostly places where there was oppression, I felt those were the places in which I would be most nourished and what I should be doing with my own art and with my own platform. And certainly going into the South of the United States, listening to the voices of rural black America, listening to the voices of those who sang out against the Ku Klux Klan and out against segregation, and women, who were the most oppressed of all, coming rising to the occasion to protest against their conditions, became the arena where my first songs were to emerge. And in that context, going in the South was for me not to exploit commercially &mdash; that didn&#8217;t come until later &mdash; but to find the resources to nourish my own creativity.
AMY GOODMAN : So there you were, the star on the stage, but you couldn&#8217;t go in the front door. Describe that experience.
HARRY BELAFONTE : When I went to the South on a professional basis, I had already arrived at a place where there was some visibility. I was going with artists who were quite well known &mdash; Marge and Gower Champion, a play called Three for Tonight . Many of the places we booked throughout the universities of America, a lot of the places we went were to the universities in the South, like Chapel Hill and the University of Texas. And in going to those places, we thought we were going not so much for the commercial reward of it &mdash; that was how we made our living &mdash; but to get to young people and to get our works before them.
And in the places that we went, some of the auditoriums were public institutions. And when I got to some of these places not only did they not want to let me in the theater, they didn&#8217;t want to let me in the places in which we were booked to stay overnight. There were many instances where, by law, no black person could stay in this hotel, or by law, no black person could be sitting at a table with a white member of the cast &mdash; I mean, white woman member of the cast &mdash; and not be sitting in the threat of incarceration and the law coming down on you, because these were then tenets of the law. This wasn&#8217;t just something that was capricious; it was written. It was the legislation of the state. And we had to come up against that. And the battle was consistent. And even in the North, places like the Waldorf Astoria and the Palmer House in Chicago and these mighty institutions of culture did have strict race laws. And in accepting employment to go in these places, rigidly placed in my contract was the requirement that those laws and those rules be suspended and not be evoked during the time of my appearance.
AMY GOODMAN : That you &mdash; you&#8217;re talking about the Waldorf Astoria in New York.
HARRY BELAFONTE : Yeah.
AMY GOODMAN : And what did they want? And what did you demand?
HARRY BELAFONTE : When I worked in the Waldorf Astoria, I was on Broadway. I came to the place called the Starlight Roof, which was at the top of the building. The main hall was the Empire Room downstairs in the great theater, and I didn&#8217;t have access to that theater. But they were renovating this place at the top of the building called the Starlight Roof. And then a man, Claude Philippe, a French Jew who ran that department within the Waldorf Astoria, completely unaware of the rules, hired me, as an act of genius to get this star to come to sing. When I appeared, and the hierarchy in the Hilton institution were awakened to the fact that there was a black guy on the top of the building singing, and he was singing songs that were constantly socially volatile, they got really angry. And how did we get booked? And when Claude Philippe pleaded his having done that, they fired him. And they couldn&#8217;t suspend me until my contract ended.
However, at the end of my tour of duty at the Waldorf, they took a look at the books, and everything had gone up 40 percent. The halls were jammed. The black waiters or the waiters of color that Claude Philippe, in response to the Waldorf Astoria hierarchy, began to put waiters of other nationalities into the service of the institution &mdash; room service went up 30 percent. And having black people in the institution began to show huge margins of profit. The entertainment division had never shown such robust sales of liquor and people coming. So, the economic viability of having me also weighed strongly upon the fact that I consistently protested these segregation pockets.
AMY GOODMAN : Harry Belafonte, when did you first meet Dr. Martin Luther King?
HARRY BELAFONTE : It was right after Birmingham &mdash; I&#8217;m sorry, Montgomery, right after the Montgomery Bus Boycott had taken hold, and the Montgomery Bus Boycott Association &mdash; the Montgomery Improvement Association. And we had all heard about this young minister, and certainly we all heard of Rosa Parks. And I got a call, and before the strike had been settled even. They had not expected it to run so long.
AMY GOODMAN : So this was in 1956?
HARRY BELAFONTE : Nineteen fifty-six. Dr. King called, and he was coming to New York to speak at the Abyssinian Baptist Church. There was &mdash; at that time, the head pastor was Adam Clayton Powell, who was in our Congress. And he was going to give a lecture to people from the ecumenical community. And he said, &quot;I&#8217;m coming to New York, and I&#8217;d love to have an opportunity to meet you. And I&#8217;d like to give you an idea of what it is that I do.&quot; And I was absolutely fascinated that he called, and I wanted very much to meet him.
So I went up to the church to hear him speak. And at the end of his lecture, he would retire to the basement. And for what he said would just be a few minutes, almost at the end of four hours, we exchanged thoughts, feelings and passions. And at the end of that meeting, I knew that I would be in his service and focus on the cause of the desegregation movement, the right to vote, and all that he stood for. Although we understood how perilous the journey would be, we were not quite prepared for all that we had to confront. And I think that it was the most important time in my life.
AMY GOODMAN : I wanted to go to a clip from Sing Your Song of Dr. Martin Luther King.
HARRY BELAFONTE : Dr. King, do you fear for your life?
REV . DR. MARTIN LUTHER KING , JR.: I&#8217;m more concerned about doing a good job, doing something for humanity and what I consider the will of God, than about longevity. Ultimately, it isn&#8217;t so important how long you live. The important thing is how well you live.
ROBERT F. KENNEDY : I have some very sad news for all of you, and I think sad news for all of our fellow citizens and people who love peace all over the world. And that is that Martin Luther King was shot and was killed tonight in Memphis, Tennessee.
HARRY BELAFONTE : I couldn&#8217;t believe it. I couldn&#8217;t. All of a sudden, our worst fears were being awakened. I really did not give myself much time to be preoccupied with any personal deep sense of loss.
AMY GOODMAN : That was Dr. Martin Luther King, and that clip is from the film about Harry Belafonte&#8217;s life, about the history of the 20th century and coming into the 21st, called Sing Your Song . Harry, that relationship you had with Dr. King that went on for more than a decade, until his assassination, how often did you speak?
HARRY BELAFONTE : I would say, easily, we spoke every day. Obviously, we missed some days or some weekends, but the line was constantly filled with thoughts and ideas and challenge and up-to-date decisions that were being made by a team of people that were always brought together when there was the moment to escalate what we were doing or to be cautious about where we were going.
And also we were trying to broaden the base of our political relationships. So much of what our mission was doing was very dependent on our relationship with the federal government, with the institutions of justice, because our plea was on a constitutional basis: the Constitution of the United States of America is being grossly violated by all the things that black people are experiencing. And if you don&#8217;t have the instruments of government and the federal government on your side, including the courts, then you really can&#8217;t do very much, because all the laws that bound us to such cruel experience were state laws, and there was no way to appeal the injustice within the state structure. So we had to find ways in which to broaden our campaign to include a national movement and it becoming a national movement to entice federal intervention.
AMY GOODMAN : Do you know how many of those hundreds of conversations were recorded by the FBI ?
HARRY BELAFONTE : I think my safest bet would be all of them. I don&#8217;t know when it would have started, but &mdash;
AMY GOODMAN : Have you gotten transcripts of those conversations?
HARRY BELAFONTE : Yes, I&#8217;ve gotten transcripts. I&#8217;ve gotten some stuff from the Freedom of Information Act. What&#8217;s very important is the fact that in the first 10 years of pursuing to get those files, I have letters that come from both the CIA and the FBI assuring me, &quot;With all honesty and with having done all due diligence and deep research, such documents don&#8217;t exist. There are none.&quot; And eventually we had other sources that came through other ways in which they began to look through files and saw my name and situations &mdash;
AMY GOODMAN : Like Taylor Branch, the historian.
HARRY BELAFONTE : Taylor Branch, the historian, he was most revealing in what he had done with the research. But also journalists and other people who were digging to get stories on other subjects came across those files and informed us. And then, finally, the FBI capitulated. And the first documents they sent, about hundreds of pages, 99 percent of those pages were just one big black stroke. So the insult against intelligence to send those kinds of files to a citizen whose rights were being violated was an insult to not only intelligence, but a crushing of the rights to information and to living in a society that is more open and transparent.
AMY GOODMAN : Talk about the march from Selma to Montgomery and who you brought down, and the fear at that time, and how these artists were also a kind of protection, the front lines, if you will, to protect the people who were at great risk whose names were not famous.
HARRY BELAFONTE : I think all the artists who did this understood that, understood that there was the threat to life and that some irrational person somewhere or some irrational group somewhere would find it very adventurous to mark them as one of the targets. There&#8217;d be a lot of heroism coming from the clan of these retarded people, emotionally and socially, to say they killed a celebrity, which in fact became in vogue not so shortly after this period. Look what they did to John Kennedy and to so many others, Dr. King, and etc. But these artists understood that. It wasn&#8217;t &mdash; they were not blinded by it. They weren&#8217;t blind to it, I should say. And by putting themselves on the line, it heightened public curiosity. And in heightening public curiosity, it meant that things were forced to be more transparent. And they weren&#8217;t quite ready to reveal themselves that way &mdash; I&#8217;m talking about the opposition.
Except it&#8217;s important to note that at the very night of our concert, the night thereafter, was when Mrs. Liuzzo was murdered, and as a matter of fact, in the car in which she had taken one of the members of our group to the airport. She was on her way back. Tony Bennett gave up his seat in that ride.
AMY GOODMAN : Tony Bennett was there, singing.
HARRY BELAFONTE : Yeah, he was there. And he gave up his seat to someone else, to Mrs. Liuzzo and the young man that was with her.
AMY GOODMAN : She was a white woman who wanted to support the struggle, the civil rights struggle &mdash;
HARRY BELAFONTE : She was the wife of &mdash;
AMY GOODMAN : &mdash; by driving people?
HARRY BELAFONTE : Yes. She was a member of the Automobile Workers Union, and she volunteered to come down and was one of the organizers. And she drove cars to give people facility back and forth to the different places in which artists had to reside. And in doing that service, on her way back from the airport, she fell a target to murderers who killed her. That was to have been Tony Bennett&#8217;s car.
It was also important, I think, because the kind of artists that came down didn&#8217;t have a platform on which they were going to be very visible. Singers could always be heard, but &mdash; Leonard Bernstein came down. And when he and I spoke, Leonard said, &quot;I don&#8217;t sing. There will be no orchestra to conduct. But morally I feel an obligation to let my presence be seen and to let people draw whatever strength from that they might be able to garnish, to know that their struggle has touched all of us.&quot; So there were many who people don&#8217;t even know about.
AMY GOODMAN : You also helped fund Freedom Summer.
HARRY BELAFONTE : Yes.
AMY GOODMAN : Talk about that, putting your finances behind the struggle. I mean, you now &mdash; what, in &#8217;55 or before, had the first gold record, Calypso , gold, million-selling record, first one in this country. Some had singles, but you had the record.
HARRY BELAFONTE : Yeah, it was the first album to achieve the sales of a million. And beyond all of the hoopla that came with that fact from the commercial end stood the studio and the record company. What was very prophetic about that moment for me was that it became symbolic of an instruction that Paul Robeson had given me. And he said, &quot;Get them to sing your song, and they&#8217;ll want to know who you are.&quot; And in that little exchange down in the dressing room of the Village Vanguard, I woke up not too long after that wonderful piece of counsel to understand what he meant, because that album housed the song &quot;Banana Boat (Day-O).&quot; And the whole world was singing the song, in a literal sense. But also, when I looked at the thousands of people that came to the stadiums to hear that song and others, I realized that the world was singing my song. And in Robeson&#8217;s counsel, this was the opportunity to begin to spread truth and to open up opportunities for information to flow.
It was the opportunity to reach out to other artists, who may not have been heard otherwise or needed or be heard, like Miriam Makeba. America knew nothing about the struggles of the people in Africa. Miriam Makeba came; she got the platform. Ed Sullivan was convinced that, in his world, to let Miriam Makeba come on the program and to sing in Xhosa &mdash; and for him it was an adventure, and he had been told by the programmers that they&#8217;re not going to understand. And he said, &quot;Oh, they&#8217;ll understand. Harry likes it, it&#8217;s good enough for me.&quot; And he got on the air, and there was Miriam Makeba singing these songs, and her popularity became quite intense.
AMY GOODMAN : Which was very important for the anti-apartheid struggle &mdash;
HARRY BELAFONTE : Absolutely.
AMY GOODMAN : &mdash; spreading into the United States.
HARRY BELAFONTE : Absolutely. Not only the anti-apartheid struggle, which spread in the United States, but for a greater understanding of the liberation of the whole continent, because there was people like Sékou Touré and Nyerere and Tom Mboya, and all of the entire continent was awakened with the idea of liberation. Having African artists, eventually Hugh Masekela and others, the whole idea of world music was seeded in the fact that the banana boat songs from the Caribbean &mdash; it opened up more music from Cuba and the whole power in Afro-Cuban jazz and what those great Cuban artists did, who pollinated American jazz with such great harmonies in song. All of that stuff was a melting pot for a greater truth.
AMY GOODMAN : Harry Belafonte, the legendary singer, activist, actor, humanitarian This is Democracy Now! A new film is out on his life. It&#8217;s called Sing Your Song . Back in a minute.
[break]
AMY GOODMAN : &quot;Island in the Sun&quot; by Harry Belafonte, as we continue our conversation with the legendary musician, actor, activist, Harry Belafonte, the subject of the new film Sing Your Song . I spoke to him in Park City, Utah, during the Sundance Film Festival.
AMY GOODMAN : In the film, Sing Your Song , you talk about bringing many Kenyan students to the United States, funding them to come to the United States, being a part of that. And one of those people was President Obama&#8217;s father, Barack Obama.
HARRY BELAFONTE : Yes. The first airlift, there were 81 students, and the British government fought us tenaciously. They tried to stop the plane. They tried to say we were violating international law and rules. They protested vigorously, especially since Jackie Robinson was my partner in this mischief. They got very upset. And our first airlift of 81 students landed. There were several planes after that. In our second contingent came this young man by the name of Barack Obama. And his name wasn&#8217;t &quot;Senior&quot; then, because Junior hadn&#8217;t been born. But Barack Obama, Sr., or Barack Obama, came. He was a student, did his time of study, as did all the other Africans. And the contract with them was really an understanding that we will find housing, we will protect you in every way economically, we&#8217;ll get your visas validated, you do your term of study. But you&#8217;re obliged at that point to then go back to Africa and help in the development of your own countries. And the spirit of that was quite intense, and we all had a great sense of opportunity.
AMY GOODMAN : Can you talk about your relationship in the early &#39;60s with the Kennedys? The Kennedy &mdash; President Kennedy, you know, is seen as the partner in fighting for civil rights, and the accomplishments even after his death of Voting Rights Act. But you didn&#39;t always see eye to eye.
HARRY BELAFONTE : No, we didn&#8217;t always see eye to eye at all. The overture that was made to me by the Kennedys to meet with the then-senator Jack Kennedy was the result of a happening. Jackie Robinson, who was one of the mightiest forces within the black community, was a Democrat and had tenaciously committed himself to principles of the Democratic Party. But as is the case, the Democratic Party was most dismissing and somewhat paternalistic about black citizens that were committed to a lot of the interests of the party. And in one such moment, they heaved an insult on Jackie Robinson, which just infuriated him. And he stepped away from the Democratic Party, denouncing them, and in that denunciation, took an alliance with the Republicans, really as an act of vendetta rather than an act of philosophical choice. And when he did that, it sent a shudder through liberal America that Jackie Robinson, this icon, this vision, had stepped into the camp of the opposition. And in a flurry to try to fill that void, they looked around at who was possible, a possible candidate. And in that context, they came to me.
And Jack Kennedy said he would like to have a meeting. And I saw no problem with that, and I needed to hear what he had to say. And in that evening that he came to the house, we sat and talked for a long period of time, and as he explained to me why he thought it was important for me to be on board with his campaign, I also saw the opportunity to explain to him that nothing that he was telling me was sufficient enough motivation. I thought he had missed the boat altogether. He did not understand, with any real depth of understanding, what black people were going through, what the Democratic Party should be paying attention to, what his reign would mean to this force of change that was happening on the horizon. And the absence of knowledge that he revealed kind of &mdash; it kind of stunned me. But I saw it also as an opportunity to then bring that information to the table, because I knew there were people working for him who knew much better than he knew, who were in his camp. Harris Wofford was one of the people, from Pennsylvania, the Quaker movement, and very much involved in liberations of slaves and stuff like that. And with people like him, we began this campaign with information.
AMY GOODMAN : What is your assessment of President Obama?
HARRY BELAFONTE : If I take a shift from how confused and how complicated the politics of this country is, I&#8217;d have to first of all say that the fact that the collective power of the voters of this nation, among all of its citizens, should have chosen to elect him as the president of the United States says something about America&#8217;s deeper resonance. Where really lies Americans&#8217;, America&#8217;s passion? What does its citizens really hope for? Having said that, I must then say that I am somewhat dismayed that there has not been a greater revelation of the use of his power to make choices, not only for legislation, but for public discourse and debate, in a greater way than he has availed us of.
And I&#8217;m reminded very quickly of a story, sitting with Eleanor Roosevelt, told us one night up there in Hyde Park after dinner. We loved &mdash; we reveled in her stories. And she told me the &mdash; told us the story of her husband and his first meeting with great, powerful labor leader named A. Philip Randolph, who was the head of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, a job that was quite menial but very critical to the American railway system. And she loved A. Philip Randolph and his intellect and his evaluations as a union organizer, and in bringing him to the White House for dinner, invited A. Philip Randolph to tell the President his view of the state of the union from the Negro perspective and from the perspective of the black workers. And as a great mind and thinker, very much engaged, A. Philip Randolph held forth, and Roosevelt listened very carefully, and very stimulated by what Philip Randolph had to say. At the end of that moment, A. Philip Randolph was waiting for a response. And Roosevelt, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, said to him &mdash; of course, paraphrasing, he said, &quot;Mr. Randolph, I&#8217;ve heard everything you have to say, the way in which you&#8217;ve criticized the fact that I have not used the power of my platform sufficiently in the service of the workers of this nation, and particularly the Negro people, that I didn&#8217;t use my bully pulpit more vigorously. And I cannot deny that that may be the case. As a matter of fact, I believe that is the case. And in that context, I&#8217;d like to ask you to do me a favor. And that is, if that is so, I&#8217;d like to ask you to go out and make me do what you think it is I should do. Go out and make me do it.&quot;
And when you ask me about Barack Obama, it is exactly what happened to Kennedy. We, the American people, made the history of that time come to another place by our passion and our commitment to change. What is saddened &mdash; what is sad for this moment is that there is no force, no energy, of popular voice, popular rebellion, popular upheaval, no champion for radical thought at the table of the discourse. And as a consequence, Barack Obama has nothing to listen to, except his detractors and those who help pave the way to his own personal comfort with power &mdash; power contained, power misdirected, power not fully engaged. And it is our task to no longer have expectations of him, unless we have forced him to the table and he still resists us. And if he does that, then we know what else we have to do, is to make change completely. But I think he plays the game that he plays because he sees no threat from not evidencing concerns for the poor. He sees no threat from not evidencing a deeper concern for the needs of black people, as such. He feels no great threat from not evidencing a greater policy towards the international community, for expressing thoughts that criticize the American position on things and turns that around. Until we do that, I think we&#8217;ll be forever disappointed in what that administration will deliver.
AMY GOODMAN : And to those who say, &quot;If you want President Obama re-elected, you will undermine him if you criticize him; and consider the alternative&quot;?
HARRY BELAFONTE : I think we will not only undermine him, but undermine the hopes of this nation, if we don&#8217;t criticize him. Absence of protest in the times of this kind of national crisis &mdash; Theodore Roosevelt once says, &quot;When tyranny takes over the national agenda, it is that time that the voices of protest must be awakened. And if you don&#8217;t raise your voice in protest, you are a patriotic traitor.&quot; And I believe that patriotism is betrayed by those voices that are not heard. Those who would detract you from that fact are those who have a vested interest in maintaining the status quo. Nothing will happen but good for Barack Obama and the United States of America, and indeed the world, if everybody stepped to the table and said, &quot;This is the course we must be on.&quot;
AMY GOODMAN : Have you let President Obama know your views? You have been with him.
HARRY BELAFONTE : Every opportunity I&#8217;ve had to put that before him, he has heard. I have not had a chance to put it to him as forcefully as I would like to, because he has not yet given us the accessibility to those places where this could be said in a more articulate way and not always on the fly.
But he once said something to me during his campaign for the presidency, and he says &mdash; he said, you know &mdash; I said, &quot;I&#8217;ve heard you&quot; &mdash; he was talking before businessmen on Wall Street here in &mdash; there in New York. And he said to me &mdash; I said, &quot;Well, you know, I hope you bring the challenge more forcefully to the table.&quot; And he said, &quot;Well, when are you and Cornel West going to cut me some slack?&quot; And I got caught with that remark. And I said to him, in rebuttal, I said, &quot;What makes you think we haven&#8217;t?&quot; And the truth of the matter is that we were somewhat contained even at the extent to which we criticized him during the campaign, in the hopes that it would energize his capacity to get elected and that, once he was elected, that burden would be off his back and he would use this new platform to do things other than what we have been experiencing. And I think any further retreat from bringing truth to power and forcing him to hear the voice of the people would be a disservice to this country and all that it promises to be.
AMY GOODMAN : Harry Belafonte, you have always been there for Haiti. What is your assessment of Haiti today? We just went down after the earthquake, and then after six months, to look at any progress, of which there had been almost none. At this point, it&#8217;s President Clinton, former President Clinton, who is in charge of the recovery, with the prime minister of Haiti, Bellerive, but all say it&#8217;s really the foreign interests that are in charge. What is your assessment of what&#8217;s happening there?
HARRY BELAFONTE : My assessment of what&#8217;s happening in Haiti is really very much attuned to what I call business as usual. It&#8217;s not the first time Haiti has been in trouble, in severe trouble. And America has a pattern in looking at the devastation that takes place in regions where they have great interests. And they move in, first and foremost, to look how to use the moment of distress to further those interests. And after those interests have been put in place, they look at all else. And how do you protect American foreign policy? Who will you support that will emerge from the ranks of these people to be the leading voices? And who do we determine will become the leaders of these people in this moment of desperate need? That&#8217;s not true just &mdash; that&#8217;s not just true about Haiti. This is true about any place that has a moment of upheaval, to step in and to try to change the course of history of their experience. And in this context, Haiti is once again at the doorstep of need. And I think it&#8217;s what America is not doing that is making all the difference in what&#8217;s happening to this beleaguered nation.
And I think the presence of Clinton, as welcomed as that might be for using his power to focus light on the tragedy, his presence really blurs the deeper truth of what&#8217;s going on, because his presence suggests that power is being used properly. But in fact, power is being severely abused, in trying to reach out for the needs of the peoples of Haiti, the politics, the political process, choosing the voting process, who will be funded by the great resources that pour out of America that will be the next leader. The next leader will be the guy who has the most money. And the people who usually get the most money are the people who are not at the best interests of the indigenous, are not anywhere near the best interests of the people. They&#8217;re at the best interests of American capital, the best interests of American policy, and at our behest. And this is not a new theory. If you want to look at the Monroe Doctrine and what happened when we wrote that, we stated what the business would be for America&#8217;s power, especially in this hemisphere. We have always been the colonizer of this hemisphere, wherever we&#8217;ve been. And our policy will prevail everywhere, or no policy will prevail. And I think that America must be awakened to that.
And let me hasten to do something that I hope you will keep in when this broadcast is edited. And that is, I cannot tell you the untold good that you do for the constituencies that you reach, primarily among young people. I&#8217;ve sat with them in places across the length and breadth of this country when you were on the air. And I listen to their response when you reveal the deeper truth of what&#8217;s going on in so many places. And the realization that in many instances you&#8217;re the only voice is not only a testimony to your own courage and your own dignity and your own sense of moral destiny, but it&#8217;s also a reflection of how vast we&#8217;ve abused our power at getting information to people so they can make healthy decisions on how to use their space and their power.
AMY GOODMAN : Harry Belafonte. A new film has been made about his life. It&#8217;s called Sing Your Song . The activist, the actor, the singer, the humanitarian. AMYGOODMAN: Fifty years ago, a mixed group of black and white students calling themselves the Freedom Riders risked their lives by riding buses into the South to challenge segregation. On May 16, 1961, their bus was attacked by a mob when it stopped in Birmingham, Alabama. A new documentary that traces the Freedom Ride movement premiers tonight on PBSAmerican Experience.

Well, today we spend the hour with one of those who supported the Freedom Rides and played a key role in the civil rights movement: the legendary musician, actor and humanitarian, Harry Belafonte. The son of Jamaican immigrants, Harry Belafonte grew up in the streets of Harlem and Jamaica. In the '50s, he spearheaded the calypso craze, was the first person in history to sell over a million albums. He was also the first African American to win an Emmy. Along with his rise to worldwide stardom, Harry Belafonte became deeply involved in the civil rights movement. He was one of Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King's closest confidants and helped to organize the March on Washington in 1963.

Now a new documentary chronicles his life. It’s called Sing Your Song. It’s co-produced by Harry Belafonte’s daughter Gina. [It will air on HBO this fall.] I sat down with Harry Belafonte in Park City, Utah, after his film premiered at the Sundance Film Festival and began by asking him why he made Sing Your Song.

HARRYBELAFONTE: It came into being from so many different perspectives. So many coincidences collided, and all of a sudden one day I woke up, and there I was with cameras rolling everywhere. A lot of people have often talked to me about leaving some memoir behind on my journey, and especially my daughter Gina, who is just always prodding me to — "You’ve got to do it. You’ve got to do it. You’ve got to do it." And although I kind of understood the spirit of the challenge, I was deeply concerned about how you would take 80 years of history and all the things that I thought were important to my journey and put that into the technology and into the demands of pop culture and getting the word out.

What tilted my commitment to this was the death of a friend. Marlon Brando was my schoolmate. We met each other before our platforms had given us the access that we have had. And when he passed away, beyond having lost a close friend, what bothered me was that what he was about and how he used his power and his platform, his art and his own history, in a commitment to the disenfranchised, for the wretched of the earth, for people who had no one articulating as fully as they should for the interests of those who have been abused and oppressed, and the way he stepped into it, sometimes quietly — most of the time quietly — and did what he did with it — the indigenous people, Native Americans, Latinos — the way he stepped into the black community, the way in which he used himself, you know, a tremendous force, to move the agenda, without any exploitation of "Look at me, and here’s what I’m doing." With his passing away, he took that legacy with him, and I wasn’t sure who would be around to retrieve it.

And then I began to look at a number of people like him who had passed away and we never sang their song. And they always sang ours. And that became the kind of a titillating concept that let me think that maybe we could do this. My great fear was about a lot of self-anointing. We are, at worst or at best, very narcissistic in our profession. It’s always about "Look at me! Look at me! Look at me!" And although some of that is unavoidable, I was concerned that my journey would carry too much of that self-serving. Yet, from a cinema point of view, I was the only force that could take the audience through the narrative. I was the only one that I had at my disposal that could personalize the information.

AMYGOODMAN: Talk about your first memories of being politically active, your consciousness of who you were in this country, in the United States of America.

HARRYBELAFONTE: I’m not quite sure precisely when social and political activism became a visible brand of my DNA, but it seems to me that I was born into it. It is hard to be born into the experience in the world of poverty and not develop some instinct for survival and resistance to those things that oppress you. My mother was a feisty lady. Although she had never gotten into a place of formal education, she came here and had to learn skills, became a seamstress. She became an expert cook. She worked at odds and ends in jobs. She never resisted the opportunity to fight oppression, especially segregation and all the things that plagued people who were immigrants. In her resistance, she counseled us constantly.

AMYGOODMAN: Now, professionally, you started more acting before you really professionally singing, is that right?

HARRYBELAFONTE: Well, acting was the complete key, was the main key to my getting involved. In this play that we did of Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men, the director had created a character in the play who would become the balladeer. He would be a force. The director moved throughout the play to — in the changing of sets, changing of cues, lighting cues, changing of mood. And this character would emerge from the darkness of the corners of the stage and sing the songs of the day, for those migrant workers coming from Southwest America. And most of the songs that I had to sing were the songs that had been written by Huddie Ledbetter and by Woody Guthrie. As a matter of fact, I opened the play with a Woody Guthrie song.

Anyway, let me jump to the quick of this. It was approaching the material as an actor, because the director spent a lot of time on what the balladeer would do, how he would positioned and — how he would be positioned, what the intensity of the moment of singing the song would mean to the development of the play or the scene. And in that context, I approached music as a tool that was really about social information. It wasn’t just harmony and chords and notes and melody, all that was obvious. But it was the content and the power of song. And having been heard in that play in that context, I was offered a job to become a singer. And since I couldn’t find other work, being a singer was a good challenge. So I put a repertoire together, walked into a night club called the Royal Roost, met guys like Charlie Parker and Miles Davis and Max Roach.

AMYGOODMAN: They were your backup band?

HARRYBELAFONTE: My first backup band were those guys. And they just launched me into a world from which I have never looked back.

AMYGOODMAN: Harry Belafonte, the legendary music, actor and humanitarian. A new film is out on his life. It’s called Sing Your Song. We’re back with Harry in a minute.

[break]

AMYGOODMAN: "Jamaica Farewell" by Harry Belafonte, the son of Jamaican immigrants. This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. I’m Amy Goodman, as we continue with the legendary musician, actor and humanitarian. He’s the subject of a new documentary about his life called Sing Your Song.

AMYGOODMAN: Well, one of the incredible stories told in Sing Your Song is your traveling through the South and trying to sing your song. Talk about that experience.

HARRYBELAFONTE: Paul Robeson, who was a mentor and a man for whom I had enormous love and admiration, was the supreme example for me of how to use your life with dignity and with courage — not bravado, but genuine social courage, to put all that’s on the line to come up against the forces of oppression, who controlled so much of what you could or could not do as an artist. And to defy that fact and go after the larger goal of changing the faces of oppression inspired me. And he went everywhere there was the opportunity to be heard, whether it was going into Spain to sing during the great Spanish revolutionary war in ’30s, whether it was going to England. He went and he worked with the Welsh miners. As a matter of fact, his whole engagement, politically, had been stimulated by what happened when he met the Welsh miners. And he sang with them, and he went into their world.

Well, when I watched what he did and how many places he went for inspiration, and mostly places where there was oppression, I felt those were the places in which I would be most nourished and what I should be doing with my own art and with my own platform. And certainly going into the South of the United States, listening to the voices of rural black America, listening to the voices of those who sang out against the Ku Klux Klan and out against segregation, and women, who were the most oppressed of all, coming rising to the occasion to protest against their conditions, became the arena where my first songs were to emerge. And in that context, going in the South was for me not to exploit commercially — that didn’t come until later — but to find the resources to nourish my own creativity.

AMYGOODMAN: So there you were, the star on the stage, but you couldn’t go in the front door. Describe that experience.

HARRYBELAFONTE: When I went to the South on a professional basis, I had already arrived at a place where there was some visibility. I was going with artists who were quite well known — Marge and Gower Champion, a play called Three for Tonight. Many of the places we booked throughout the universities of America, a lot of the places we went were to the universities in the South, like Chapel Hill and the University of Texas. And in going to those places, we thought we were going not so much for the commercial reward of it — that was how we made our living — but to get to young people and to get our works before them.

And in the places that we went, some of the auditoriums were public institutions. And when I got to some of these places not only did they not want to let me in the theater, they didn’t want to let me in the places in which we were booked to stay overnight. There were many instances where, by law, no black person could stay in this hotel, or by law, no black person could be sitting at a table with a white member of the cast — I mean, white woman member of the cast — and not be sitting in the threat of incarceration and the law coming down on you, because these were then tenets of the law. This wasn’t just something that was capricious; it was written. It was the legislation of the state. And we had to come up against that. And the battle was consistent. And even in the North, places like the Waldorf Astoria and the Palmer House in Chicago and these mighty institutions of culture did have strict race laws. And in accepting employment to go in these places, rigidly placed in my contract was the requirement that those laws and those rules be suspended and not be evoked during the time of my appearance.

AMYGOODMAN: That you — you’re talking about the Waldorf Astoria in New York.

HARRYBELAFONTE: Yeah.

AMYGOODMAN: And what did they want? And what did you demand?

HARRYBELAFONTE: When I worked in the Waldorf Astoria, I was on Broadway. I came to the place called the Starlight Roof, which was at the top of the building. The main hall was the Empire Room downstairs in the great theater, and I didn’t have access to that theater. But they were renovating this place at the top of the building called the Starlight Roof. And then a man, Claude Philippe, a French Jew who ran that department within the Waldorf Astoria, completely unaware of the rules, hired me, as an act of genius to get this star to come to sing. When I appeared, and the hierarchy in the Hilton institution were awakened to the fact that there was a black guy on the top of the building singing, and he was singing songs that were constantly socially volatile, they got really angry. And how did we get booked? And when Claude Philippe pleaded his having done that, they fired him. And they couldn’t suspend me until my contract ended.

However, at the end of my tour of duty at the Waldorf, they took a look at the books, and everything had gone up 40 percent. The halls were jammed. The black waiters or the waiters of color that Claude Philippe, in response to the Waldorf Astoria hierarchy, began to put waiters of other nationalities into the service of the institution — room service went up 30 percent. And having black people in the institution began to show huge margins of profit. The entertainment division had never shown such robust sales of liquor and people coming. So, the economic viability of having me also weighed strongly upon the fact that I consistently protested these segregation pockets.

AMYGOODMAN: Harry Belafonte, when did you first meet Dr. Martin Luther King?

HARRYBELAFONTE: It was right after Birmingham — I’m sorry, Montgomery, right after the Montgomery Bus Boycott had taken hold, and the Montgomery Bus Boycott Association — the Montgomery Improvement Association. And we had all heard about this young minister, and certainly we all heard of Rosa Parks. And I got a call, and before the strike had been settled even. They had not expected it to run so long.

AMYGOODMAN: So this was in 1956?

HARRYBELAFONTE: Nineteen fifty-six. Dr. King called, and he was coming to New York to speak at the Abyssinian Baptist Church. There was — at that time, the head pastor was Adam Clayton Powell, who was in our Congress. And he was going to give a lecture to people from the ecumenical community. And he said, "I’m coming to New York, and I’d love to have an opportunity to meet you. And I’d like to give you an idea of what it is that I do." And I was absolutely fascinated that he called, and I wanted very much to meet him.

So I went up to the church to hear him speak. And at the end of his lecture, he would retire to the basement. And for what he said would just be a few minutes, almost at the end of four hours, we exchanged thoughts, feelings and passions. And at the end of that meeting, I knew that I would be in his service and focus on the cause of the desegregation movement, the right to vote, and all that he stood for. Although we understood how perilous the journey would be, we were not quite prepared for all that we had to confront. And I think that it was the most important time in my life.

AMYGOODMAN: I wanted to go to a clip from Sing Your Song of Dr. Martin Luther King.

HARRYBELAFONTE: Dr. King, do you fear for your life?

REV. DR. MARTINLUTHERKING, JR.: I’m more concerned about doing a good job, doing something for humanity and what I consider the will of God, than about longevity. Ultimately, it isn’t so important how long you live. The important thing is how well you live.

ROBERT F. KENNEDY: I have some very sad news for all of you, and I think sad news for all of our fellow citizens and people who love peace all over the world. And that is that Martin Luther King was shot and was killed tonight in Memphis, Tennessee.

HARRYBELAFONTE: I couldn’t believe it. I couldn’t. All of a sudden, our worst fears were being awakened. I really did not give myself much time to be preoccupied with any personal deep sense of loss.

AMYGOODMAN: That was Dr. Martin Luther King, and that clip is from the film about Harry Belafonte’s life, about the history of the 20th century and coming into the 21st, called Sing Your Song. Harry, that relationship you had with Dr. King that went on for more than a decade, until his assassination, how often did you speak?

HARRYBELAFONTE: I would say, easily, we spoke every day. Obviously, we missed some days or some weekends, but the line was constantly filled with thoughts and ideas and challenge and up-to-date decisions that were being made by a team of people that were always brought together when there was the moment to escalate what we were doing or to be cautious about where we were going.

And also we were trying to broaden the base of our political relationships. So much of what our mission was doing was very dependent on our relationship with the federal government, with the institutions of justice, because our plea was on a constitutional basis: the Constitution of the United States of America is being grossly violated by all the things that black people are experiencing. And if you don’t have the instruments of government and the federal government on your side, including the courts, then you really can’t do very much, because all the laws that bound us to such cruel experience were state laws, and there was no way to appeal the injustice within the state structure. So we had to find ways in which to broaden our campaign to include a national movement and it becoming a national movement to entice federal intervention.

AMYGOODMAN: Do you know how many of those hundreds of conversations were recorded by the FBI?

HARRYBELAFONTE: I think my safest bet would be all of them. I don’t know when it would have started, but —

AMYGOODMAN: Have you gotten transcripts of those conversations?

HARRYBELAFONTE: Yes, I’ve gotten transcripts. I’ve gotten some stuff from the Freedom of Information Act. What’s very important is the fact that in the first 10 years of pursuing to get those files, I have letters that come from both the CIA and the FBI assuring me, "With all honesty and with having done all due diligence and deep research, such documents don’t exist. There are none." And eventually we had other sources that came through other ways in which they began to look through files and saw my name and situations —

AMYGOODMAN: Like Taylor Branch, the historian.

HARRYBELAFONTE: Taylor Branch, the historian, he was most revealing in what he had done with the research. But also journalists and other people who were digging to get stories on other subjects came across those files and informed us. And then, finally, the FBI capitulated. And the first documents they sent, about hundreds of pages, 99 percent of those pages were just one big black stroke. So the insult against intelligence to send those kinds of files to a citizen whose rights were being violated was an insult to not only intelligence, but a crushing of the rights to information and to living in a society that is more open and transparent.

AMYGOODMAN: Talk about the march from Selma to Montgomery and who you brought down, and the fear at that time, and how these artists were also a kind of protection, the front lines, if you will, to protect the people who were at great risk whose names were not famous.

HARRYBELAFONTE: I think all the artists who did this understood that, understood that there was the threat to life and that some irrational person somewhere or some irrational group somewhere would find it very adventurous to mark them as one of the targets. There’d be a lot of heroism coming from the clan of these retarded people, emotionally and socially, to say they killed a celebrity, which in fact became in vogue not so shortly after this period. Look what they did to John Kennedy and to so many others, Dr. King, and etc. But these artists understood that. It wasn’t — they were not blinded by it. They weren’t blind to it, I should say. And by putting themselves on the line, it heightened public curiosity. And in heightening public curiosity, it meant that things were forced to be more transparent. And they weren’t quite ready to reveal themselves that way — I’m talking about the opposition.

Except it’s important to note that at the very night of our concert, the night thereafter, was when Mrs. Liuzzo was murdered, and as a matter of fact, in the car in which she had taken one of the members of our group to the airport. She was on her way back. Tony Bennett gave up his seat in that ride.

AMYGOODMAN: Tony Bennett was there, singing.

HARRYBELAFONTE: Yeah, he was there. And he gave up his seat to someone else, to Mrs. Liuzzo and the young man that was with her.

AMYGOODMAN: She was a white woman who wanted to support the struggle, the civil rights struggle —

HARRYBELAFONTE: She was the wife of —

AMYGOODMAN: — by driving people?

HARRYBELAFONTE: Yes. She was a member of the Automobile Workers Union, and she volunteered to come down and was one of the organizers. And she drove cars to give people facility back and forth to the different places in which artists had to reside. And in doing that service, on her way back from the airport, she fell a target to murderers who killed her. That was to have been Tony Bennett’s car.

It was also important, I think, because the kind of artists that came down didn’t have a platform on which they were going to be very visible. Singers could always be heard, but — Leonard Bernstein came down. And when he and I spoke, Leonard said, "I don’t sing. There will be no orchestra to conduct. But morally I feel an obligation to let my presence be seen and to let people draw whatever strength from that they might be able to garnish, to know that their struggle has touched all of us." So there were many who people don’t even know about.

AMYGOODMAN: You also helped fund Freedom Summer.

HARRYBELAFONTE: Yes.

AMYGOODMAN: Talk about that, putting your finances behind the struggle. I mean, you now — what, in ’55 or before, had the first gold record, Calypso, gold, million-selling record, first one in this country. Some had singles, but you had the record.

HARRYBELAFONTE: Yeah, it was the first album to achieve the sales of a million. And beyond all of the hoopla that came with that fact from the commercial end stood the studio and the record company. What was very prophetic about that moment for me was that it became symbolic of an instruction that Paul Robeson had given me. And he said, "Get them to sing your song, and they’ll want to know who you are." And in that little exchange down in the dressing room of the Village Vanguard, I woke up not too long after that wonderful piece of counsel to understand what he meant, because that album housed the song "Banana Boat (Day-O)." And the whole world was singing the song, in a literal sense. But also, when I looked at the thousands of people that came to the stadiums to hear that song and others, I realized that the world was singing my song. And in Robeson’s counsel, this was the opportunity to begin to spread truth and to open up opportunities for information to flow.

It was the opportunity to reach out to other artists, who may not have been heard otherwise or needed or be heard, like Miriam Makeba. America knew nothing about the struggles of the people in Africa. Miriam Makeba came; she got the platform. Ed Sullivan was convinced that, in his world, to let Miriam Makeba come on the program and to sing in Xhosa — and for him it was an adventure, and he had been told by the programmers that they’re not going to understand. And he said, "Oh, they’ll understand. Harry likes it, it’s good enough for me." And he got on the air, and there was Miriam Makeba singing these songs, and her popularity became quite intense.

AMYGOODMAN: Which was very important for the anti-apartheid struggle —

HARRYBELAFONTE: Absolutely.

AMYGOODMAN: — spreading into the United States.

HARRYBELAFONTE: Absolutely. Not only the anti-apartheid struggle, which spread in the United States, but for a greater understanding of the liberation of the whole continent, because there was people like Sékou Touré and Nyerere and Tom Mboya, and all of the entire continent was awakened with the idea of liberation. Having African artists, eventually Hugh Masekela and others, the whole idea of world music was seeded in the fact that the banana boat songs from the Caribbean — it opened up more music from Cuba and the whole power in Afro-Cuban jazz and what those great Cuban artists did, who pollinated American jazz with such great harmonies in song. All of that stuff was a melting pot for a greater truth.

AMYGOODMAN: Harry Belafonte, the legendary singer, activist, actor, humanitarian This is Democracy Now! A new film is out on his life. It’s called Sing Your Song. Back in a minute.

[break]

AMYGOODMAN: "Island in the Sun" by Harry Belafonte, as we continue our conversation with the legendary musician, actor, activist, Harry Belafonte, the subject of the new film Sing Your Song. I spoke to him in Park City, Utah, during the Sundance Film Festival.

AMYGOODMAN: In the film, Sing Your Song, you talk about bringing many Kenyan students to the United States, funding them to come to the United States, being a part of that. And one of those people was President Obama’s father, Barack Obama.

HARRYBELAFONTE: Yes. The first airlift, there were 81 students, and the British government fought us tenaciously. They tried to stop the plane. They tried to say we were violating international law and rules. They protested vigorously, especially since Jackie Robinson was my partner in this mischief. They got very upset. And our first airlift of 81 students landed. There were several planes after that. In our second contingent came this young man by the name of Barack Obama. And his name wasn’t "Senior" then, because Junior hadn’t been born. But Barack Obama, Sr., or Barack Obama, came. He was a student, did his time of study, as did all the other Africans. And the contract with them was really an understanding that we will find housing, we will protect you in every way economically, we’ll get your visas validated, you do your term of study. But you’re obliged at that point to then go back to Africa and help in the development of your own countries. And the spirit of that was quite intense, and we all had a great sense of opportunity.

AMYGOODMAN: Can you talk about your relationship in the early '60s with the Kennedys? The Kennedy — President Kennedy, you know, is seen as the partner in fighting for civil rights, and the accomplishments even after his death of Voting Rights Act. But you didn't always see eye to eye.

HARRYBELAFONTE: No, we didn’t always see eye to eye at all. The overture that was made to me by the Kennedys to meet with the then-senator Jack Kennedy was the result of a happening. Jackie Robinson, who was one of the mightiest forces within the black community, was a Democrat and had tenaciously committed himself to principles of the Democratic Party. But as is the case, the Democratic Party was most dismissing and somewhat paternalistic about black citizens that were committed to a lot of the interests of the party. And in one such moment, they heaved an insult on Jackie Robinson, which just infuriated him. And he stepped away from the Democratic Party, denouncing them, and in that denunciation, took an alliance with the Republicans, really as an act of vendetta rather than an act of philosophical choice. And when he did that, it sent a shudder through liberal America that Jackie Robinson, this icon, this vision, had stepped into the camp of the opposition. And in a flurry to try to fill that void, they looked around at who was possible, a possible candidate. And in that context, they came to me.

And Jack Kennedy said he would like to have a meeting. And I saw no problem with that, and I needed to hear what he had to say. And in that evening that he came to the house, we sat and talked for a long period of time, and as he explained to me why he thought it was important for me to be on board with his campaign, I also saw the opportunity to explain to him that nothing that he was telling me was sufficient enough motivation. I thought he had missed the boat altogether. He did not understand, with any real depth of understanding, what black people were going through, what the Democratic Party should be paying attention to, what his reign would mean to this force of change that was happening on the horizon. And the absence of knowledge that he revealed kind of — it kind of stunned me. But I saw it also as an opportunity to then bring that information to the table, because I knew there were people working for him who knew much better than he knew, who were in his camp. Harris Wofford was one of the people, from Pennsylvania, the Quaker movement, and very much involved in liberations of slaves and stuff like that. And with people like him, we began this campaign with information.

AMYGOODMAN: What is your assessment of President Obama?

HARRYBELAFONTE: If I take a shift from how confused and how complicated the politics of this country is, I’d have to first of all say that the fact that the collective power of the voters of this nation, among all of its citizens, should have chosen to elect him as the president of the United States says something about America’s deeper resonance. Where really lies Americans’, America’s passion? What does its citizens really hope for? Having said that, I must then say that I am somewhat dismayed that there has not been a greater revelation of the use of his power to make choices, not only for legislation, but for public discourse and debate, in a greater way than he has availed us of.

And I’m reminded very quickly of a story, sitting with Eleanor Roosevelt, told us one night up there in Hyde Park after dinner. We loved — we reveled in her stories. And she told me the — told us the story of her husband and his first meeting with great, powerful labor leader named A. Philip Randolph, who was the head of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, a job that was quite menial but very critical to the American railway system. And she loved A. Philip Randolph and his intellect and his evaluations as a union organizer, and in bringing him to the White House for dinner, invited A. Philip Randolph to tell the President his view of the state of the union from the Negro perspective and from the perspective of the black workers. And as a great mind and thinker, very much engaged, A. Philip Randolph held forth, and Roosevelt listened very carefully, and very stimulated by what Philip Randolph had to say. At the end of that moment, A. Philip Randolph was waiting for a response. And Roosevelt, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, said to him — of course, paraphrasing, he said, "Mr. Randolph, I’ve heard everything you have to say, the way in which you’ve criticized the fact that I have not used the power of my platform sufficiently in the service of the workers of this nation, and particularly the Negro people, that I didn’t use my bully pulpit more vigorously. And I cannot deny that that may be the case. As a matter of fact, I believe that is the case. And in that context, I’d like to ask you to do me a favor. And that is, if that is so, I’d like to ask you to go out and make me do what you think it is I should do. Go out and make me do it."

And when you ask me about Barack Obama, it is exactly what happened to Kennedy. We, the American people, made the history of that time come to another place by our passion and our commitment to change. What is saddened — what is sad for this moment is that there is no force, no energy, of popular voice, popular rebellion, popular upheaval, no champion for radical thought at the table of the discourse. And as a consequence, Barack Obama has nothing to listen to, except his detractors and those who help pave the way to his own personal comfort with power — power contained, power misdirected, power not fully engaged. And it is our task to no longer have expectations of him, unless we have forced him to the table and he still resists us. And if he does that, then we know what else we have to do, is to make change completely. But I think he plays the game that he plays because he sees no threat from not evidencing concerns for the poor. He sees no threat from not evidencing a deeper concern for the needs of black people, as such. He feels no great threat from not evidencing a greater policy towards the international community, for expressing thoughts that criticize the American position on things and turns that around. Until we do that, I think we’ll be forever disappointed in what that administration will deliver.

AMYGOODMAN: And to those who say, "If you want President Obama re-elected, you will undermine him if you criticize him; and consider the alternative"?

HARRYBELAFONTE: I think we will not only undermine him, but undermine the hopes of this nation, if we don’t criticize him. Absence of protest in the times of this kind of national crisis — Theodore Roosevelt once says, "When tyranny takes over the national agenda, it is that time that the voices of protest must be awakened. And if you don’t raise your voice in protest, you are a patriotic traitor." And I believe that patriotism is betrayed by those voices that are not heard. Those who would detract you from that fact are those who have a vested interest in maintaining the status quo. Nothing will happen but good for Barack Obama and the United States of America, and indeed the world, if everybody stepped to the table and said, "This is the course we must be on."

AMYGOODMAN: Have you let President Obama know your views? You have been with him.

HARRYBELAFONTE: Every opportunity I’ve had to put that before him, he has heard. I have not had a chance to put it to him as forcefully as I would like to, because he has not yet given us the accessibility to those places where this could be said in a more articulate way and not always on the fly.

But he once said something to me during his campaign for the presidency, and he says — he said, you know — I said, "I’ve heard you" — he was talking before businessmen on Wall Street here in — there in New York. And he said to me — I said, "Well, you know, I hope you bring the challenge more forcefully to the table." And he said, "Well, when are you and Cornel West going to cut me some slack?" And I got caught with that remark. And I said to him, in rebuttal, I said, "What makes you think we haven’t?" And the truth of the matter is that we were somewhat contained even at the extent to which we criticized him during the campaign, in the hopes that it would energize his capacity to get elected and that, once he was elected, that burden would be off his back and he would use this new platform to do things other than what we have been experiencing. And I think any further retreat from bringing truth to power and forcing him to hear the voice of the people would be a disservice to this country and all that it promises to be.

AMYGOODMAN: Harry Belafonte, you have always been there for Haiti. What is your assessment of Haiti today? We just went down after the earthquake, and then after six months, to look at any progress, of which there had been almost none. At this point, it’s President Clinton, former President Clinton, who is in charge of the recovery, with the prime minister of Haiti, Bellerive, but all say it’s really the foreign interests that are in charge. What is your assessment of what’s happening there?

HARRYBELAFONTE: My assessment of what’s happening in Haiti is really very much attuned to what I call business as usual. It’s not the first time Haiti has been in trouble, in severe trouble. And America has a pattern in looking at the devastation that takes place in regions where they have great interests. And they move in, first and foremost, to look how to use the moment of distress to further those interests. And after those interests have been put in place, they look at all else. And how do you protect American foreign policy? Who will you support that will emerge from the ranks of these people to be the leading voices? And who do we determine will become the leaders of these people in this moment of desperate need? That’s not true just — that’s not just true about Haiti. This is true about any place that has a moment of upheaval, to step in and to try to change the course of history of their experience. And in this context, Haiti is once again at the doorstep of need. And I think it’s what America is not doing that is making all the difference in what’s happening to this beleaguered nation.

And I think the presence of Clinton, as welcomed as that might be for using his power to focus light on the tragedy, his presence really blurs the deeper truth of what’s going on, because his presence suggests that power is being used properly. But in fact, power is being severely abused, in trying to reach out for the needs of the peoples of Haiti, the politics, the political process, choosing the voting process, who will be funded by the great resources that pour out of America that will be the next leader. The next leader will be the guy who has the most money. And the people who usually get the most money are the people who are not at the best interests of the indigenous, are not anywhere near the best interests of the people. They’re at the best interests of American capital, the best interests of American policy, and at our behest. And this is not a new theory. If you want to look at the Monroe Doctrine and what happened when we wrote that, we stated what the business would be for America’s power, especially in this hemisphere. We have always been the colonizer of this hemisphere, wherever we’ve been. And our policy will prevail everywhere, or no policy will prevail. And I think that America must be awakened to that.

And let me hasten to do something that I hope you will keep in when this broadcast is edited. And that is, I cannot tell you the untold good that you do for the constituencies that you reach, primarily among young people. I’ve sat with them in places across the length and breadth of this country when you were on the air. And I listen to their response when you reveal the deeper truth of what’s going on in so many places. And the realization that in many instances you’re the only voice is not only a testimony to your own courage and your own dignity and your own sense of moral destiny, but it’s also a reflection of how vast we’ve abused our power at getting information to people so they can make healthy decisions on how to use their space and their power.

AMYGOODMAN: Harry Belafonte. A new film has been made about his life. It’s called Sing Your Song. The activist, the actor, the singer, the humanitarian.

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Mon, 16 May 2011 00:00:00 -0400"Sundance and the Art of Democracy" By Amy Goodmanhttp://www.democracynow.org/blog/2011/1/26/sundance_and_the_art_of_democracy
tag:democracynow.org,2011-01-26:blog/fc7a73 By Amy Goodman with Denis Moynihan
PARK CITY , Utah—This small, alpine mountain town is transformed every winter during the Sundance Film Festival into a buzzing hive of the movie industry. While much of the attention is focused on the celebrities, Sundance has actually become a key intersection of art, film, politics and dissent. It is where many of the most powerful documentaries premiere, films about genuine grass-roots struggles, covering the sweep of social justice history and the burning issues of today. They educate and inspire a growing audience about the true nature, and cost, of direct democracy.
“The Last Mountain” is a documentary about the threat to Coal River Mountain in West Virginia, which is slated for destruction by mountaintop-removal coal mining, one of the most environmentally devastating forms of mining being practiced today. The worst offender is the coal giant Massey Energy and its former CEO , Don Blankenship. A broad coalition of activists from around the world has been active in trying to stop Massey, led by regular, working-class people from the surrounding towns and hamlets of Appalachia. Robert F. Kennedy Jr., a longtime environmentalist and lawyer, joined them in the fight and is featured in the film. I asked him about the struggle:
“This film is about the subversion of American democracy. Last year, the Supreme Court overruled a hundred years of ironclad American precedent with the Citizens United case, and got rid of a law that was passed by Teddy Roosevelt in 1907 that saved democracy from the huge concentrations of wealth that had created essentially a corporate kleptocracy during the Gilded Age, and Americans had forfeited their democracy during that time…. For the first time since the Gilded Age, we’re seeing those kinds of economic concentrations return to our country.”
Kennedy describes the subversion by corporate power of the press, the courts, and Congress and state legislatures: “The erosion of all these institutions, I think, of American democracy have forced people who care about our country, and who care about civic health, into this box of civil disobedience and local action.”
This is a historic month for Robert Kennedy Jr.: It is the 50th anniversary of his uncle John Kennedy’s inauguration as president, and also of his father Robert Kennedy’s inauguration as U.S. attorney general. I asked him about those two, felled by assassins’ bullets:
“To me, the most important thing that John Kennedy did, and my father was trying to do, was to stand up to the military-industrial complex, which ... President Eisenhower, in his final speech just before my uncle took the reins of power, said this is the greatest threat to American democracy in the history of our republic, ever: the growth of an uncontrolled military-industrial complex in combination with large corporations and with influential members of Congress, who would slowly but systematically deprive Americans of the civil rights and the constitutional rights that made this country an exemplary nation.”
In a moving moment here at Sundance, Kennedy, who had just flown in from the funeral of his uncle, Sargent Shriver (founder of the Peace Corps), came out after a screening of “The Last Mountain,” and was embraced by Harry Belafonte, himself the subject of the film that opened this year’s festival, the breathtaking biopic of the singer and activist called “Sing Your Song,” which is really a chronicle of the movements for racial and economic justice of the 20th century.
Belafonte was one of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.‘s closest confidants. I spoke with Harry about his lifetime of activism, and about his feelings about President Barack Obama. He told me, “During his campaign for the presidency, he was talking before businessmen on Wall Street in New York. I said, ‘Well, you know, I hope you bring the challenge more forcefully to the table.’ And he said, ‘Well, when are you and Cornel West going to cut me some slack?’ I said, ‘What makes you think we haven’t?’”
Belafonte was a friend of Eleanor Roosevelt, who told him of an exchange between her late husband, President Franklin Roosevelt, and A. Philip Randolph, a key organizer of the 1963 March on Washington, and before that the major force behind the black train conductors’ union, the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters. Randolph described what needed to happen to improve the condition of black and working people in the country. Roosevelt said he did not disagree with anything Randolph said. Retelling the story here to me at Sundance, Harry leaned back in his chair and repeated what Roosevelt told Randolph: “Go out and make me do it.”
By Amy Goodman with Denis Moynihan

PARKCITY, Utah—This small, alpine mountain town is transformed every winter during the Sundance Film Festival into a buzzing hive of the movie industry. While much of the attention is focused on the celebrities, Sundance has actually become a key intersection of art, film, politics and dissent. It is where many of the most powerful documentaries premiere, films about genuine grass-roots struggles, covering the sweep of social justice history and the burning issues of today. They educate and inspire a growing audience about the true nature, and cost, of direct democracy.

“The Last Mountain” is a documentary about the threat to Coal River Mountain in West Virginia, which is slated for destruction by mountaintop-removal coal mining, one of the most environmentally devastating forms of mining being practiced today. The worst offender is the coal giant Massey Energy and its former CEO, Don Blankenship. A broad coalition of activists from around the world has been active in trying to stop Massey, led by regular, working-class people from the surrounding towns and hamlets of Appalachia. Robert F. Kennedy Jr., a longtime environmentalist and lawyer, joined them in the fight and is featured in the film. I asked him about the struggle:

“This film is about the subversion of American democracy. Last year, the Supreme Court overruled a hundred years of ironclad American precedent with the Citizens United case, and got rid of a law that was passed by Teddy Roosevelt in 1907 that saved democracy from the huge concentrations of wealth that had created essentially a corporate kleptocracy during the Gilded Age, and Americans had forfeited their democracy during that time…. For the first time since the Gilded Age, we’re seeing those kinds of economic concentrations return to our country.”

Kennedy describes the subversion by corporate power of the press, the courts, and Congress and state legislatures: “The erosion of all these institutions, I think, of American democracy have forced people who care about our country, and who care about civic health, into this box of civil disobedience and local action.”

This is a historic month for Robert Kennedy Jr.: It is the 50th anniversary of his uncle John Kennedy’s inauguration as president, and also of his father Robert Kennedy’s inauguration as U.S. attorney general. I asked him about those two, felled by assassins’ bullets:

“To me, the most important thing that John Kennedy did, and my father was trying to do, was to stand up to the military-industrial complex, which ... President Eisenhower, in his final speech just before my uncle took the reins of power, said this is the greatest threat to American democracy in the history of our republic, ever: the growth of an uncontrolled military-industrial complex in combination with large corporations and with influential members of Congress, who would slowly but systematically deprive Americans of the civil rights and the constitutional rights that made this country an exemplary nation.”

In a moving moment here at Sundance, Kennedy, who had just flown in from the funeral of his uncle, Sargent Shriver (founder of the Peace Corps), came out after a screening of “The Last Mountain,” and was embraced by Harry Belafonte, himself the subject of the film that opened this year’s festival, the breathtaking biopic of the singer and activist called “Sing Your Song,” which is really a chronicle of the movements for racial and economic justice of the 20th century.

Belafonte was one of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.‘s closest confidants. I spoke with Harry about his lifetime of activism, and about his feelings about President Barack Obama. He told me, “During his campaign for the presidency, he was talking before businessmen on Wall Street in New York. I said, ‘Well, you know, I hope you bring the challenge more forcefully to the table.’ And he said, ‘Well, when are you and Cornel West going to cut me some slack?’ I said, ‘What makes you think we haven’t?’”

Belafonte was a friend of Eleanor Roosevelt, who told him of an exchange between her late husband, President Franklin Roosevelt, and A. Philip Randolph, a key organizer of the 1963 March on Washington, and before that the major force behind the black train conductors’ union, the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters. Randolph described what needed to happen to improve the condition of black and working people in the country. Roosevelt said he did not disagree with anything Randolph said. Retelling the story here to me at Sundance, Harry leaned back in his chair and repeated what Roosevelt told Randolph: “Go out and make me do it.”

]]>
Wed, 26 Jan 2011 16:50:00 -0500"Sundance and the Art of Democracy" By Amy Goodman By Amy Goodman with Denis Moynihan
PARK CITY , Utah—This small, alpine mountain town is transformed every winter during the Sundance Film Festival into a buzzing hive of the movie industry. While much of the attention is focused on the celebrities, Sundance has actually become a key intersection of art, film, politics and dissent. It is where many of the most powerful documentaries premiere, films about genuine grass-roots struggles, covering the sweep of social justice history and the burning issues of today. They educate and inspire a growing audience about the true nature, and cost, of direct democracy.
“The Last Mountain” is a documentary about the threat to Coal River Mountain in West Virginia, which is slated for destruction by mountaintop-removal coal mining, one of the most environmentally devastating forms of mining being practiced today. The worst offender is the coal giant Massey Energy and its former CEO , Don Blankenship. A broad coalition of activists from around the world has been active in trying to stop Massey, led by regular, working-class people from the surrounding towns and hamlets of Appalachia. Robert F. Kennedy Jr., a longtime environmentalist and lawyer, joined them in the fight and is featured in the film. I asked him about the struggle:
“This film is about the subversion of American democracy. Last year, the Supreme Court overruled a hundred years of ironclad American precedent with the Citizens United case, and got rid of a law that was passed by Teddy Roosevelt in 1907 that saved democracy from the huge concentrations of wealth that had created essentially a corporate kleptocracy during the Gilded Age, and Americans had forfeited their democracy during that time…. For the first time since the Gilded Age, we’re seeing those kinds of economic concentrations return to our country.”
Kennedy describes the subversion by corporate power of the press, the courts, and Congress and state legislatures: “The erosion of all these institutions, I think, of American democracy have forced people who care about our country, and who care about civic health, into this box of civil disobedience and local action.”
This is a historic month for Robert Kennedy Jr.: It is the 50th anniversary of his uncle John Kennedy’s inauguration as president, and also of his father Robert Kennedy’s inauguration as U.S. attorney general. I asked him about those two, felled by assassins’ bullets:
“To me, the most important thing that John Kennedy did, and my father was trying to do, was to stand up to the military-industrial complex, which ... President Eisenhower, in his final speech just before my uncle took the reins of power, said this is the greatest threat to American democracy in the history of our republic, ever: the growth of an uncontrolled military-industrial complex in combination with large corporations and with influential members of Congress, who would slowly but systematically deprive Americans of the civil rights and the constitutional rights that made this country an exemplary nation.”
In a moving moment here at Sundance, Kennedy, who had just flown in from the funeral of his uncle, Sargent Shriver (founder of the Peace Corps), came out after a screening of “The Last Mountain,” and was embraced by Harry Belafonte, himself the subject of the film that opened this year’s festival, the breathtaking biopic of the singer and activist called “Sing Your Song,” which is really a chronicle of the movements for racial and economic justice of the 20th century.
Belafonte was one of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.‘s closest confidants. I spoke with Harry about his lifetime of activism, and about his feelings about President Barack Obama. He told me, “During his campaign for the presidency, he was talking before businessmen on Wall Street in New York. I said, ‘Well, you know, I hope you bring the challenge more forcefully to the table.’ And he said, ‘Well, when are you and Cornel West going to cut me some slack?’ I said, ‘What makes you think we haven’t?’”
Belafonte was a friend of Eleanor Roosevelt, who told him of an exchange between her late husband, President Franklin Roosevelt, and A. Philip Randolph, a key organizer of the 1963 March on Washington, and before that the major force behind the black train conductors’ union, the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters. Randolph described what needed to happen to improve the condition of black and working people in the country. Roosevelt said he did not disagree with anything Randolph said. Retelling the story here to me at Sundance, Harry leaned back in his chair and repeated what Roosevelt told Randolph: “Go out and make me do it.” nonadulttv-gDemocracy Now!News